


Stranger Gods

by Casylum



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Alternate Universe, Dean/Cas Big Bang Challenge 2012, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-11-14
Updated: 2012-11-14
Packaged: 2017-11-18 16:08:43
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 26,236
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/562888
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Casylum/pseuds/Casylum
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In the beginning, there were gods. And then after, angels. A few millennia after that, nothing. Or so it would seem. As old gods rise in the heat of the desert, along with the threats they lost themselves to contain, Dean Winchester finds that losing himself was the easy part.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Stranger Gods

**Author's Note:**

> Seven months ago, I did something very stupid, and this fic is the result of all that. Thank you for reading my small contribution to this year’s DCBB, and I hope you enjoyed the tale I tried to tell. 
> 
> Thanks a million to [Rayn3ll](http://rayn3ll.deviantart.com/) for choosing my fic to make art for, and for dealing with all of the communication issues I managed to have during the course of it.
> 
> Thanks also to [Indigo](http://huntedwinchester.tumblr.com/), for being my beta and holding onto the back of my shirt when I wanted to fling myself out the window because it will never be perfect Indigo never never never.
> 
> This fic is also posted on my [dreamwidth](http://theladywanderer.dreamwidth.org/4587.html).

_Prologue_ : _Interlude_

 

xXxXx

 

_Three months ago—Earth_

_Somewhere in central Nebraska_

 

In a modest bar in what amounted to the middle of nowhere, five women were sitting around a table. There were cards laid out on the faded wood, spades, hearts, clubs and diamonds dumped in heaps and scattered in the organized chaos that was a poker game. No chips were present—just an ever shifting supply of bar peanuts—but the game was intense enough that none of the players were up for much banter besides the occasional “call” or “all in”.

 

Other than that, the game—and the bar—were quiet.

 

After one particularly slow round that essentially consisted of one call after another, the dealer spoke.

 

“So,” she said, tapping her fingers against the stack of cards in front of her. “Are we going to discuss why we’re here?”

 

“Because men are idiots?” asked the younger woman on the dealer’s right, leaning forward as she spoke, her blonde hair glinting in the lights that hung from the rafters.

 

“If that were the case, we’d be meeting every day, not just once every half a millennia or so,” replied the dark haired woman to the left of the dealer. “Though I will admit that these men are stupider than most.”

 

“Never should have let them go off on their own,” said the curly haired blonde directly to the brunette’s left, eyes rolling. “I mean, most people don’t spend their days off thinking ‘Gosh, I’d like to end the world someday’”—she glanced at the dealer, before adding—“No offense, Kali.”

 

“None taken,” the dealer replied, beginning to shuffle. “Though, it’s Cassie now. It’s easier for the small town folks to deal with, and less questions for me in the long run.”

 

“Cronos was crazy,” the last woman said, looking up from where she’d been shifting her pile of peanuts into a small pyramid. “I’m surprised he lasted as long at playing the mortal as he did.”

 

“Apparently Michael killed him,” the curly haired woman said, accepting the cards Cassie was now beginning to deal.

 

“You’d know,” Cassie said with a wink, before turning to the dark haired woman, cards sliding across the table with a slight repetitive swoosh of sound. “You too, Ruby. Both you and Jess haven’t been able to stay away from Lucifer—“

 

“Sam,” Jess intercut, sharing a long look with Ruby as she did so.

 

“ _Sam_ ,” Cassie repeated with emphasis, “even if he and his brother were still unaware of anything beyond the run of the mill supernatural.”

 

“What can I say?” Ruby replied, eyes on the slips of laminated paper fanned in her hands. “He makes an impression.”

 

“A girl just can’t leave that behind,” Jess added, similarly focused on her hand, though her eyes flicked to Ruby and back when she thought Cassie wasn’t looking.

 

“Besides, it’s not like we can talk, can we Bela?” the younger woman said, throwing two peanuts into the center to start the game, Cassie’s initial stint at dealing finished.

 

Bela snorted and tossed two peanuts from her own carefully organized stack. “I can’t talk, and Cassie over there can’t talk, but you Jo…” She shook her head before trading in two cards. “He gave you the look that turned us into puddles and you said no.”

 

“Because I value my skin,” Jo said wryly. “If Cas found out that Mich— _Dean_ —and I had been knocking boots, he’d eviscerate me. I did evisceration once, and I’m not really keen on repeating the experience.”

 

“He’s worth a little evisceration,” Cassie said, glaring at Bela who grinned and took the ace out of her sleeve, slapping it on the table to be incinerated by a jet of flame from one of Cassie’s long fingernails.

 

“Who’s this you’re talking about?”

 

A raspy voice came behind the group, roughened by years of whiskey and war cries. They twisted in their seats, hair flying briefly and hands twitching towards various weapons scattered around the table. The sudden tension was broken almost immediately when Jo’s face broke into a wide smile. “Mom, I didn’t know you were going to get in tonight.”

 

“Job wasn’t near as difficult as I thought it was,” Ellen huffed, then dragged a chair over from one of the neighboring tables and sat down between Cassie and Ruby. “And you never answered my question.”

 

“Michael,” said Bela crisply, lightly drumming her cards against the table.

 

“Trouble,” Ellen retorted, arms folding across her chest. “That whole family, nothing but trouble.”

 

Jess spoke for the first time in a while, voice sliding under the rest until they fell silent. “I heard Raphael’s started it again.”

 

“It?” asked Ruby, suddenly tense.

 

“The end of the world,” finished Jess, one hand going out to rest lightly on Ruby’s shoulder, fingers flexing in a slight squeeze. “Missouri told me this morning.”

 

“That means—“Cassie started, and then stopped.

 

Bela laughed, the sound oddly flat in the confines of the bar. “That means Cas has been let out of Heaven.” She looked at Cassie, a grin stretching across her face like a red slash. “Who knows, Kali, we might get eviscerated sooner than we thought.”

 

“Not soon enough, Morrigan,” Cassie replied, voice grim. “If Raphael gets his way, we’re all going to wish we were dead long before he’s finished.”

 

The six women sat around the table for a long time after that, Cassie’s last words resting heavy in the air, none of them willing to disturb it.

 

Jo finally pushed back from the table, chair scraping against the wood floor. “Well, sitting around here brooding like a bunch of old hens is going to do us exactly jack shit.”

 

“That’s my girl,” Ellen muttered, but Jo ignored her.

 

“Now, I don’t know about you, but I have been honoring Michael and the boys’ request to be left out of the shit that is our eternal existence for the past thousand or so years,” she continued. “But now that Raphael has decided that he, Zach and the asshat brigade have a better idea of the way the world should go—“

 

“Straight into a brick wall,” said Ruby under her breath, glares from both Jo and Jess doing nothing to quiet her.

 

“Anyway,” Jo said, only slightly exasperated at Ruby’s sniping.  “If that’s what’s happened, I say we take the fight to them, instead of waiting for it to sweep all of humanity away in blood.”

 

“Brilliant imagery,” Bela said absently, studying her nails, cards forgotten on the table. “Did you practice that much?”

 

“Only every minute since Missouri gave her the news,” Ellen said, standing up herself, only to be followed by the others.

 

“If we’re taking the fight to them, what are we doing, exactly?” Jess asked, curiously.

 

A thumping bang sounded from the area of the bar, and a large woman with hair in wild, kinky ringlets stumped out, the movement still somehow elegant despite its violence. She grabbed a bottle of whiskey and a fistful of shot glasses from the bar before coming to a stop in front of the now silent group of women.

 

“I don’t know about you,” said Missouri, resident oracle at Delphi, the tea shop across the road, “But I am going to drink. Several things, most of them with names I can’t pronounce and don’t want to.

 

“After that,” she said, cracking open the whiskey and pouring it one by one into the shot glasses held in her hand and passing them out, until they were all equipped with a finger or so of alcohol and Missouri was in possession of solely what remained of the bottle.

 

 “Well, after that , you—,” Missouri waved at where Ruby and Jess were standing, drinks in hand, “—are going to Las Vegas.”

 

“Sin City?” Jess asked, frowning. “Why?”

 

“Because,” Missouri said after taking a swig from the bottle held in her hand. “That’s where Sam Winchester is going to be. And where Sam is, Dean will be, eventually. And where Dean is…”

 

“Castiel will show up, sooner or later,” finished Cassie, a smile starting to tug at the corners of her mouth.

 

“A regular family reunion,” Missouri concluded, raising her bottle in toast to Cassie’s comment.

 

“Here’s to deposed gods, broken angels, and the end of the world.”

 

“Hear, hear!” The women said in unison, raising their glasses and knocking back the whiskey, a smooth, yet harsh burn making its way down seven throats.

 

xXxXx

_Chapter One: Sam_

 

xXxXx

 

_Present day—Earth_

_Las Vegas, Nevada_

 

Sam hated Vegas.  
  
He hated the lights, the noise, the overwhelming sense that everyone living there was one step away from collapsing in on themselves. All it would take, he’d thought on more than one occasion, was for the casinos to go, for the promise of easy money and the benevolence of Lady Luck to disappear, and Vegas and her bright lights and brittle people would follow shortly after.  
  
And Dean knew this, knew that he loathed the city and the omnipresent heat, and even took a slight bit of offense at its label of Sin City. (The original Sin City had been a marvel of human depravity, a blood soaked metropolis built on bone and pulped flesh, stitched together by the tattered sinews of the dead. The whole thing had been held upright in an oozing, twisting mass, while the remaining populace rutted in the streets. The ever present haze of opiates burning in bowls carved from the tops of skulls had dulled their senses until they couldn’t have cared if they were fucking in a feather bed or the entrails of some poor slob who’d encountered the wrong side of a sword. But he wasn’t supposed to remember that.)  
  
Despite knowing all of this (aside from the bit about the original Sin City, Sam was attempting to keep some sort of lid on that), and likely because he knew Vegas was guaranteed to worm its way under Sam’s skin, Dean had deliberately designated it their yearly meeting place. All of which resulted in a grumpy Sam staring down the strip once a year, the back of his neck prickling with the chaos and desperation that hung thicker than the desert heat, car pinging in the background as he waited for the long black shape of the Impala to pull out from wherever it was lurking.  
  
This year, it came from the East, which was never a good sign. The Conquistadors had come from the East, as well as the Pilgrims and Colonists, dragging disease and ignorant destruction in their wake. Sam’s roots might have been firmly planted in the valleys and dust of the Fertile Crescent, but he was able to sympathize with the fate of his adopted home. Besides, it had treated him better than his own ever had.  
  
Still, the Impala coming in from the East was a bad sign, not that Sam would admit to anyone besides his immediate family that he even had a passing belief in that sort of thing. There’d been a shift in worldviews as civilization “progressed” and the people forgot that there had been a reason their ancestors were afraid of the dark and things that went bump in the night. Not to mention the prevalence of dragons across all cultures and races, but that was a different story. The point was, mentioning that he got a bad feeling from someone arriving from a particular direction would not have served Sam well in the workplace. And so he didn’t.  
  
His musings were cut short when the car pulled up into a space that had suddenly emptied behind him, her engine shutting off with an unhappy rumble. Sam glanced over to see the driver’s side door pushed open by a long arm covered by a battered leather jacket, the last notes of a Zeppelin song creeping out with it, only to be pushed back by the heavy air.  
  
A dusty boot hit the black pavement, and Dean’s body followed not long after, unfolding in the bright Nevada sunshine, bones and cartilage cracking as his arms twisted together over his head. He froze there a minute, muscle and bone stretched as far as they would go, his whole body vibrating with tension, as if he were still trying to reach that one spot that just would not give. A moment longer and Dean’s arms dropped, all of the coiled up energy flowing out of him, leaving a tall man with short cropped blonde-brown hair and a lazy slouch in place of the line of tightly focused intent.  
  
Dean turned with a smile, slamming the door shut with one hand. A few steps forward and he was holding out his hand, eyes crinkling at the edges, the lines hinting at a smile that never quite broke loose. Sam took his hand in a firm grip, and then found himself being pulled forward into a one armed hug that caused a good amount of air to exit his lungs in a rushing _whoosh._ When he was back steady on his own feet, the center of his back stinging slightly from the slap Dean had delivered before letting him go, Sam took a moment to look at his brother, to assess. Same green eyes, same golden tan he’d managed to maintain ever since he was sixteen and took his first job working construction, same dusting of freckles across his nose.  
  
_Good_ , Sam thought. _He doesn’t know_. Not that he could keep it from him very long, that was the whole damn point of the thing, but he wanted to give Dean a little bit longer before he slammed him with, well. Before he slammed him with himself.  
  
“How’ve you been, Sammy?” That was Dean, uncaring if he’d grown out of that name, that he was _Sam_ now (though never Samuel, there were certain things you could never get back). Sam grunted, shaking his head slightly to shift his hair away from his face.  
  
“I’m good,” he said, voice a little tighter than it should’ve been. He cleared his throat, ignored Dean’s look, and tried again. “But I hate Vegas.”  
  
Dean laughed, a short bark of amusement. “What’s there to hate, Sam?” he said, spreading his arms wide to encompass the strip behind him. “Money, girls, music, Elvis impersonators. Las Vegas is like all the good things in life poured into one place.”

   
“And stirred in a vat of heat and sweat,” Sam muttered.  
  
“What was that?”  
  
“Nothing, nothing.”

   
“That’s what I thought. Now, where are we staying?”

   
“I thought we could go to a hotel on the edge of the city, they’ve got a nice view of the de--”  
  
Dean brought a hand around as if to say “Stop”, his face twisted into some mockery of pain. “A hotel, Sammy? On the edge of the city? C’mon, you know that’s just not gonna swing it.”  
  
Sam rolled his eyes. They’d been meeting up in Vegas for five years now, the trips starting just after he finished law school, and he still hadn’t managed to actually keep the reservations he made at the Desert Valley Inn. He wondered if the owner thought he was insane, which was a distinct possibility. She always did look at him like he had three heads and a tail, though he’d stopped going by the hotel itself, instead making a call to the front desk and leaving it at that.  
  
“Then where do you suggest we stay?” He said, trying to keep the sentence from ending on a sigh and succeeding only marginally.  
  
The left side of Dean’s mouth hooked into what Sam supposed was a smile, though he’d long thought of it as the overly cheerful herald of doom. He knew it was wrong to kill the messenger, but if he never had to see that half-thought out smile again, it would be too soon.  
  
“Caesar’s Palace.” Sam felt the words drop like stones through the air, landing on his hatred of Vegas, and cranking it up to a desire for outright violence against the city.  
  
“A casino, Dean, really?” Was all he let slip in the end, his knowledge of what Dean did when he was merely irritated by something keeping him from doing anything else.  
  
“A casino, Sammy.” Dean’s eyes were lit up like Christmas had come in the middle of the summer desert. “Where there’re tons of people with money just flowing out of their hands, and into mine.”  
  
Sam snorted. “You do know the whole point of casinos is that the house always wins, right?”  
  
“Ah, but that’s where you’re wrong, Sam. The house always wins _in the end_. But up until that point the money is in the hands of someone else.”  
  
“What, you’re saying you know when to stop?”  
  
“That’s exactly what I’m saying.” Dean said, hands shoving themselves into jeans pockets, forcing his shoulders up into a hunch that made the leather of his jacket creak.  
  
Sam’s eyes narrowed. That last comment had hit a nerve, one that hadn’t been there the last time they’d spoken. He was tempted to sit there, the hot sun beating down and growing hotter by the minute, and simply wait his brother out. But he didn’t have the time, and besides, Sam knew that if he pushed, Dean would simply walk away with a grin and a flippant remark, and continue to dodge him for the rest of the time they were together.  
  
“Whatever, bro,” He finally said, voice containing none of the suspicion that was roiling through his body. “Just don’t come crying to me when you need money.”  
  
Dean’s shoulders lost some of their tension, and his eyes eased into their familiar crinkled gaze. “Well, there you go.”  
  
“There I go,” Sam echoed, stacking up this newfound obstacle on top of the ones he already had to discuss and groaning internally.

xXxXx

  
They parted then, both agreeing to meet up at Caesar’s, neither wanting to stand outside any longer than they had to. Sam might have thought about waiting in the heat for his brother to crack, but without that motivation, he remembered the reason he’d gravitated to the Northern states. It was the same with Dean, had been the same with their father.  
  
The Winchesters, it seemed, liked the cold, despised the heat, and bitched about the weather either way because no one south of Montana knew how to drive.  
  
The Impala rumbled off, her nose pointed in such a way that she’d approach the casino from the South, which Sam supposed was as good as anything. He followed behind not long after, though he refused to follow his brother street for street. Dean had a thing about racing, about winning, a thing that Sam didn’t want to have to deal with at the moment. The open road was one thing, the middle of a city was quite another.  
  
Fifteen minutes after they’d both slid back into the front seats of their cars, both Sam and Dean were standing in Caesar’s lobby, room keys shoved into back pockets and duffel bags slung over shoulders. Sam’s face was carefully blank as they walked through the long banks of slots and card tables, while Dean’s was all smiles, his green eyes bouncing from one table to the next. The sounds of shuffling cards and clacking chips, nearly drowned out by the mechanical _bleep-bloop_ of the slot machines were giving Sam a headache, but Dean seemed to soak it all in, his footsteps getting lighter, his fingers relaxing their slight death-grip on the strap of his bag.  
  
“Look at all them rich folk,” Dean said, one arm going out to indicate the craps and baccarat tables closer to the back, velvet ropes separating them and a line of doors from the rest of the room. “All that money, and they decide to spend it here.”  
  
His face closed down a little, a repeat of the shutdown Sam had seen back on the road, this time under the cold fluorescent lights of Caesar’s Palace instead of the warm sun of the Nevada desert. Dean’s arm dropped, and he shifted his bag higher up on his shoulder. “All that money,” he muttered, and then spoke at a normal volume. “Well, it’ll be my money soon enough. Just gotta rest up--” He glanced back at Sam “--catch up.”  
  
“Yeah.” was Sam’s minimal response, and they managed to go the rest of the way without talking, even when Dean fumbled the keycard and Sam stepped in to ensure that they got inside the rooms they’d paid so much for sometime within the next century.  
  
The silence remained as they stowed their bags away, a familiar weight in the air, one that echoed with the memories of other hotels, other rooms, other trips, stretching back for as long as Sam could remember. Dean was the only constant in those memories, with John flitting in and out as the job permitted, and Mary having never been there at all.  
  
Dean flopped down on the bed soon after everything was in its place, still not having spoken, and immediately dozed off. His arms were crossed tightly across his chest, hands gripping the elbows, and his feet, boots still on, were stacked one on top of the other. If Sam had needed a visual to clue to tell him that something was most definitely _up_ with his brother, he’d just been handed one on a silver platter. In all those other memories of Dean, across states, motels, and years, he’d always slept face-down, limbs spread out in abandon, free-falling through slumber.  
  
This tightly wound, utterly stiff position was completely unlike him, but there wasn’t anything Sam could do about it now except throw a sheet over Dean and hope he woke sometime in the night to pull his own boots off. After that was done, Sam tugged off his own boots, checked to make sure his phone was charged, and then set to work on passing out himself.  
  
And if he pulled the second pillow down and wrapped his arms around it, wishing that it was a warm body instead of a cool bag of cotton and feather down, well. That was no one’s business but his own.

xXxXx

_Several millennia ago—Heaven_

_Heaven Doesn’t Believe In Road Signs_

_Heaven was beautiful._

_Everything their father had ever made was here, in its intended and most uncorrupted form, and the houses of angels shone like diamonds in the never-ending sunlight._  
  
_Lucifer hated the damn place._  
  
_“It’s so....so....._  
  
_“Fucking perfect?”_

   
_“Yes. It’s so fucking perfect and I can’t stand it.” Lucifer looked back from where he was standing to see Michael sitting cross-legged on the ground. A crowd of butterflies and hummingbirds surrounded him, and he looked very cross. “Hello, Michael.”_  
  
_“Hey, Lucy.” Michael paused to glare at the animals who were flittering around his head, then refocused. “What’s up?”_  
  
_“Besides you inciting me towards blasphemy? Not much.” Lucifer took a seat of his own, settling into the green of the grass that surrounded them. “How’s dad?”_  
  
_“Writing prophecies,” Michael said in a falsely cheery voice, his arms going up in a long swoop, disrupting the animals around him. Lucifer noted that he was careful not to hit any of them, and smiled to himself._  
  
_“Oh?”_  
  
_“Yup. He’s going through the lot, everything from floods, famines, war--” Michael stopped, looking uncomfortable._  
  
_“Floods, famines, war...?” Lucifer prodded, leaning forward as he did so._  
  
_“Floods, famines, war, and....the end of the world,” Michael finished, his voice lower than it had been before, the butterflies and hummingbirds suddenly scattering. He looked up, eyes dark and slightly haunted. “Lucy, he says we have to kill each other.”_  
  
_“I’d rather go to hell,” Lucifer said flatly, after a moment of shocked silence._

xXxXx

 

_Present day—Earth_

_Las Vegas, Nevada_

  
Sam woke up to screams.  
  
It took him a moment to figure out that they weren’t his own, the tone harsher and deeper than the cries that normally rang out in his own home, in the backseat of his own car. He had a brief pang of self-derision for the fact that he was so used to his own yelling that waking up to them didn’t surprise him anymore, and then he was up, feet over the side of the bed, searching for the true source.  
  
He didn’t have far to go.  
  
Dean was sitting up in his bed, back ramrod straight, sheets pooled around his waist. His head was tilted back, mouth agape and neck muscles straining as he let loose cry after cry. His eyes were screwed shut, creased lids leaking tears from the pressure being used to keep them closed as his eyes darted back and forth, chasing invisible enemies.  
  
Sam froze for a second, unsure of what to do. He’d never seen Dean like this before, hell, had never seen Dean _scream_ before. Even when Dad had accidentally run over his foot in the garage when Sam was six, Dean had just made a quick face and shrugged it off. Sam had found him later, holding ice to the half-crushed limb, with sweat dripping down his forehead as he slowly lifted what looked like a purple grapefruit instead of a foot on top of a small pile of pillows. Dean had seen Sam, grinned that stupid, shit-eating grin Sam was now so used to, and then apparently dozed off, the only sign of his injury the occasional twitch when he tried to shift over.  
  
But this wasn’t external, whatever it was. There was no blood, no bone bursting forth from ripped flesh, nothing. Just pale skin and sweat-soaked hair that gave nothing away to what monsters lurked behind Dean’s eyelids.

 

After a long moment, Sam moved to get out of bed, covers flying up from what parts of his body were still covered by them in a whirl of white and indistinguishable floral patterns. Before he made it halfway across the space separating him and his brother, however, Dean dropped like a rock. His body bounced a few times on the mattress, neck snapping loosely with the movement, and then he was still.

 

Sam froze for the second time that night, except this time he was standing in the middle of the room, limbs still not quite settled from the burst of energy he’d forced through them, hair a snarl that nearly blocked his line of sight.  
  
He shuffled back to the hotel bed and lowered himself slowly back down to lie on his back. Sam didn’t bother with getting the covers back from the heap on the floor. It was suddenly too hot, too sticky for him to even consider having something touching his skin. He lay there for the rest of the night, eyes half closed and mind drifting slightly, never quite achieving true sleep, as every noise from Dean’s side of the room brought him back from the edge.  
  
It was only when the room started to brighten with the light of the slow-rising desert sun that he was able to finally let go of his worry and let sleep wash over him like a wave.

xXxXx

 

_Chapter Two: Dean_

 

xXxXx

  
_Present day—Earth  
Las Vegas, Nevada_

It’s the first time in about six months Dean’s woken up without a hangover, or a leftover buzz from whatever alcohol he drank the night before, and he can’t decide whether or not he likes the feeling. It’s nice to be able to look at the sun without wanting to scream, he admits to himself, but that seems to be the only real upside. The dreams came again last night, he knows that because of the harsh scratching in his throat that he’s ever only gotten from prolonged screaming.

He can remember them this time, which he hates, the images unblurred and undistorted by the brown haze of bourbon and whiskey. Fire and blood and bones stripped of flesh, all dancing in a black sky as demons scream overhead. That’s what he dreams about, what he drinks to lock away, and he doesn’t even know why.

 _At least I have a good reason for sobering up_ , Dean thinks, finally moving to roll out of bed, the habits gained over a lifetime the only things driving him. There’s a slight shock when he hears the clomp of boots hitting the floor, echoed by the creak of leather. It takes him a moment to remember that he’d simply fallen into bed, with no breaks in between to strip of the days clothing, or even remove his boots.

He hasn’t done something like that since John was still with them.

Dean shakes his head and focuses his bleary eyes across the room, searching for Sam. He finds him sprawled out on the bed, hair a dark halo against the hotel’s sheets. The covers are in a heap beside the bed, which strikes Dean as slightly odd, seeing as Sam was always one to bundle up, but then again, people change.

He finally unlaces his boots and pulls them off, weighing the first one in his hand and considering throwing it towards the door. He decides against risking property damage and simply dumps them on the far side of the bed. His jacket doesn’t quite get the same treatment; it’s actually laid out in some sense of neatness, Dean’s fondness for the garment getting in the way of his ability to toss about his meager belongings willy-nilly.

And then he’s up, sock feet scuffing across the carpet, hands fumbling at the hem of his shirt, pulling it up and over his head to fall on the floor. He hits the bathroom door a moment later, and then it’s all a haze until he’s naked and standing under the piping hot spray of water. There’s some spluttering there, not that he’ll ever admit it, but the heat feels good, feels like it’s washing away the dirt and grime his subconscious is forced to wallow in every night.

For the second time, he wishes he were still drunk. But there’s Sammy in the other room to think about, Sammy who doesn’t need to see his older brother stumble through life because he can’t handle what’s in his head. Dean shakes his head, sending water droplets everywhere, and then lets the steady beat of water wash away his thoughts, leaving only blessed silence.

When the water starts to cool incrementally, he gets out. The tile is wet with steam, and the mirror is a pane of fog on the wall. The heat is comforting in a way the heat of his dreams aren’t. Dean knows where this comes from, watched it rise from the showerhead himself and swirl around the ceiling. Only tendrils of it had gotten sucked out by the exhaust fan, leaving the main body behind to slowly envelop the bathroom and its contents.

Dean grabs a towel and wraps it around his waist, then grabs a smaller one and rubs briskly at his hair, catching bits of his face and nose in the process. He’d left his clothes in the bedroom, so he doesn’t bother to wipe the mirror or make himself presentable in any way other than dry.

When he opens the bathroom door, it’s another shock, the cold air smacking into him and making him suck in a sharp breath. His bag is where he dropped it last night, a rolled up pair of jeans and a t-shirt nearly identical to the one he’d worn yesterday just a few seconds of digging away. The shirt goes on first, the back sticking slightly to places he wasn’t able to quite reach, and the jeans follow a moment later.

Dean backtracks to the bathroom, kicking his dirty clothes over to sit in a crumpled heap next to his boots. John would kill him for leaving things in such disarray, which is why he supposes he does it.

Back in the tiled room, the remnants of the steamy heat he’d reveled in are still there, mixed in with and being slowly overpowered by the hotel’s air conditioning unit. The mirror’s still fogged over though, except for a few trails of water that have condensed enough to pull themselves down the length of the reflective glass, leaving clear trails behind them. Dean wipes clear a long swath with the flat of his palm, shaking the moisture off at his side before taking a cursory glance to check that his hair isn’t doing anything close to what Sam’s does on a daily basis.

There’s nothing there, just a worn face with damp hair that still doesn’t know the meaning of gravity, even ten years after puberty. A quick smile that’s as much practice as it is real feeling, and Dean’s out, light switch going down with a buzzing flip and door staying half cracked, his contribution to the eventual defeat of the heat.

A look over to Sam’s side of the room and he can see that his brother’s up and at least semi-coherent, though if the way he’s holding his head, fingers all twisted up in his hair and clenched tight, is any indication, he had about as bad a night as Dean had.  Sam manages to pull his head up a bit, eyes barely visible between the strands of his hair.

“You ready for breakfast?” he asks, and his voice is as hoarse as Dean’s feels.

“Yeah,” is Dean’s response as he crosses the room to rummage in the drawers of the table near the door, searching for the room service menu. “Whaddya want?”

“A bullet to the head.”

Dean stiffens, trying not to whirl on Sam, trying not to tell him  _that’s not funny, Sammy, don’t you know that’s how dad died, don’t you know_ , because Sam doesn’t, doesn’t know the reason their father didn’t come back one night was because Dean had been forced to put a bullet in his brain.

Instead he forces out a low snort, but he still can’t turn around, can’t look Sam in the eyes.

“Uh-huh, and to eat?”

Sam groans, and the shift of bed springs tell Dean that he’s finally gotten up.

“I don’t know, uh, fruit salad if they have it, I guess?” The end of his sentence echoes a little, and then the door to the bathroom clicks and Dean’s outside, hotel menu in his hands, and regrets weighing on him like lodestones.

He shakes it off as the water kicks on and manages to read out his order to the overly perky girl on the other end of the line, only laughing a little as he asks for a breakfast salad. He gets a plate of beignets and a pot of coffee for himself, as Dean doesn’t think he can stomach anything with grease in it this morning, not if he wants to keep it down in any sort of significant way.

The next twenty minutes are spent meandering around the room, figuring out the various nooks and crannies, flipping through the channels offered on the large television bolted to one of the walls. Dean tells himself he isn’t looking for the best places to hide things, to make a stand, to run, but he’s lying and he knows it.

His phone buzzes once, a text from his boss saying that the Alyokhin account went through and that they start work in two weeks, but Dean can’t bring himself to care enough to text back. He’d finished his end of the work for the Alyokhin project six months back, before the dreams started, and he didn’t need to rehash it, or tweak any of the details until someone called with a problem.

Sam’s out of the shower before the food comes, and dressed, though he still has a towel wrapped around his head. Neither of them have hair dryers, never needed them, so Sam can either look like an idiot, or soak through his shirt waiting for the water to evaporate from his hair. An inconvenience, sure, but one Sam isn’t going to let go of.

Dean has his messy habits, and to some extent, his job, and Sam has his hair. Tiny, slightly ridiculous rebellions against a man who’d been dead for nearly eight years, but they both refused to let them go.

The knock on the door comes as Sam’s starting to pull the towel off, his hands scrubbing at the still-damp strands of his hair. He twists his head and looks at Dean, his eyes gleaming strips of hazel through a curtain of dripping brown hair, and their message is plain. Dean pulls a face and grimaces for effect, but then he’s striding across the room, feet hitting the carpet with a little more force than is strictly necessary, until he reaches the door and pulls it open.

The guy standing there is short, nondescript, the most noticeable thing about him being the cart he has in front of him and the fact that he’s wearing a hat indoors. There’s a slight shuffle as they both figure out how he’s going to get the cart in the room and past Dean, but that only lasts a few seconds.

The delivery man reaches into a pocket and Dean tenses up, unable to help himself, the reflexes built over a lifetime hard to shake. He relaxes only slightly when he’s just handed the bill and told to “Sign here, and here, and swipe your card there, and have a nice day Mr. Frampton.” Dean watches the guy wheel out a few minutes later, the contents of the cart unloaded onto a table opposite to the one he’d gotten the menu out of, his brain refusing to forget about him until he was completely out of sight, out of range of being a threat.

Sam’s voice comes from behind him after he finally gets the door shut.

“Mr. Frampton?”

Dean turns and looks at him, the beginnings of a frown tugging at the corners of his mouth. “Yeah. Old habits die hard, I guess.”

Sam snorts, and continues to pull on the shirt he’d had held up around his neck, the sleeves already on. He’d found pants sometime during Dean’s dance with the delivery guy, though apparently finding a brush for his hair was beyond his abilities at the moment.

They both move to get their food, Dean nearly groaning aloud at the sight of the beignets sans cover, Sam side eying him when he piles three of them on his plate before moving to pour himself a cup of coffee. Sam gathers his fruit salad together, and snags the smallest remaining beignet on the plate, his look defying Dean to say anything about it. For once, Dean manages to keep his mouth shut, simply lifting the coffee pot with a raised brow, then fixing Sam a cup of his own after he nods.

After he hands the mug to Sam, they eat standing up, the both of them juggling plates and cups with ease, the thought of sitting down something that doesn’t cross either of their minds. When breakfast is done, and all the powdered sugar has settled into a misty white memory that Dean dusts off the table cloth, they stand there awkwardly, neither of them saying anything, Dean not wanting to really discuss what his life has become in the last six months, and Sam shifting on his feet like he’s just as full of secrets as Dean is.

 “So,” they both start at once, and then stop, looking at each other like _why’d you have to start first, dumbass_ , and then Dean sweeps a hand out that says, _go ahead, say what you’ve gotta_ , and Sam grimaces like he’s just swallowed a lemon.

“Were you going to go out?” He finally says, and Dean can tell he’s changed the subject by the way his eyes flick out and to the side before meeting his. He doesn’t say anything about it, adding it to the huge pile of shit they don’t seem to want to mention that’s slowly pushing the both of them apart, and simply nods,  lifting his coffee mug in something of a salute of acknowledgement.

“Well, uh,” Sam continues, placing his cup down and shoving his hands into the pockets of his jeans. “I’ll see you back here then?”

Dean cracks a smile at that. “What, Sam, you going out as well? You’ve got something you need to do in Sin City?”

There’s a flash there, a fleeting glimpse of something Dean isn’t sure he wants to associate with his brother, something that doesn’t so much have a problem with Vegas as want to consume it, but that goes the way of everything else in this conversation, and is pushed to the side as Sam lets out a laugh that Dean hopes isn’t as forced as it sounds.

“Something like that,” he replies, and then the both of them are moving, piling the remains of breakfast onto a single tray, which goes outside the door for room service to pick up, and it’s silence as Dean slides back into his jacket and Sam finds what looks like the loudest plaid shirt he owns and puts it on over some awful t-shirt Dean hopes has never seen the inside of a courtroom.

“Back at six for dinner?” he says, hand on the door, twisting his head back to look at Sam, who’s standing a few feet behind him, patting down his pockets to make sure he has everything he needs. Dean feels vaguely like they’re ten and six again, and he’s making sure Sammy will be home for dinner, home before John gets back, but he shakes the feeling as fast as he can.

Sam grunts an affirmative, and with a hard twist the door’s open and they’re both out, Sam catching the lock behind them, the both of them going off in different directions down the hotel’s carpeted hallway, Dean towards the elevator down towards the casino level, Sam towards the stairs that intersect with the parking garage.

xXxXx

It’s five thirty and Dean is knee deep into a game of poker.

There’s a whale next to him, a slightly drunk Japanese man the dealer keeps eyeing when she thinks no one’s looking, but Dean’s always looking. The rest of the table is made up of higher society types, not quite rich enough to drop a mil at poker and not blink like Furikawa-Sama, but high enough up there that seven thousand dollars is chump change.

Dean doesn’t quite have that luxury, but he’s not going to let that on. He’d had the requisite twenty-five hundred ante, but that was before the whale joined and the stakes were pushed up higher than he was originally prepared to deal with. He can see the strain in the other players’ eyes, but he knows they can handle the pain of losing, if that’s what it comes to.

Barely, but they can handle it.

He can’t. It doesn’t help that they’ve been giving him looks the whole game, continuations of the looks he’d been given when he first joined, eyes flicking up and down his body, ragged jeans and weather beaten jacket swishing as he sat down. The looks had stopped when he’d fronted the money requested by the dealer, his pile of chips causing eyes to widen and then quickly flick away, though he’d only caught a slight hint of embarrassment from the woman at the end of the table.

Dean’s currently got the makings of a decent hand, possibly a great hand if he catches a break in the next few deals, and the rest of the table is getting slightly restless as they wait on the whale to make a call, wanting to know if they can match his ante, and knowing that they most likely can’t, at least not with an amount of money they can comfortably part with.

Furikawa calls, though, and then it’s Dean left in the spotlight, the last player before everyone shows their hands and he either goes home broke or weighed down with riches. He follows with Furikawa’s lead and calls, eyes on the pile of chips in the middle of the table, mentally tallying it to be worth about forty grand. And then the wave of reveals starts, seven different people laying out their cards, fans of white and black on green felt, with five others having already folded. Three of the seven honestly should have folded with the others, but there they are, and it’s too late to back out now.

Two others have relatively decent hands, with the woman who blushed having a slight edge over the other man, and then it’s Furikawa’s turn. He slaps his cards down with a laugh, shaking the chips and Dean breathes out in a slow breath, eyes briefly flicking heavenwards before he remembers that he doesn’t believe in a benevolent god.

Three deuces, a six of clubs and a four of diamonds are staring back at him from Furikawa, and he knows he’s won. Dean lays out his cards silently, catching the small gasp from the blushing lady that says she knows she just lost, and then the dealer’s called the winning hand and a great big mountain of clattering plastic is being pushed towards him.

He looks at it and the itch is still in his fingers, the burn to play more, win more, ride that fine edge between riches and destitution just a little bit longer, but he shoves it down and pushes up from the table. The dealer hands him a bag and Dean spends an awkward few moments shoveling his winnings into the mid-sized sack emblazoned with the casino’s logo before being able to walk away.

Twenty minutes later and he’s cashed out and riding an elevator back to his floor, half the money in the inner pocket of his jacket, the other half in a bank account he thinks Sammy still doesn’t know about.  That account had paid for some of his schooling, as well as pitching in with what Dean couldn’t quite cover on his own journey through America’s higher education system, though he thinks Sam had a slightly easier time of it.

The money in his jacket is getting split once they’re both back in the hotel room, Dean still relying heavily on cash and only using the bank card when he has to. His job pays well enough that he can manage that, slipping under the radar and only barely coming up for air. No paper trail, that’s what John had taught them as kids, that was what echoed in his head at night when he couldn’t sleep.

The elevator dings and the doors slide open with a rattling clank, something that doesn’t sound very good but seems to be a staple of all elevators everywhere. When Dean manages to get himself into his and Sam’s room, it’s still only five fifty, ten minutes before he even has to start looking for Sam to be walking through the door.

He takes a seat in one of the armchairs in front of the TV, twists his head to the side so he can still see the door, and dozes off, fingers still twitching at the slightest sound, reaching for a gun that hasn’t been there since John died.

xXxXx

_A few more millennia ago—Hades  
Hades Inspired Heaven’s Disbelief In Road Signs_

_Before there was ever Hell, with its heat and cloying scent of singed blood and flesh, there was a different place._

_An older place._

_Where both the good and the bad came to their final resting place, and where the walls were a solid granite reminder of the permanence of death, instead of an oozing edifice that blatantly said that the torture would never end._

_Hades burned cold, and the man who shared his name with it sat at the head, a perpetually empty chair at his side._

_Of course, that was when he could be bothered to attend to “matters of State”, as Charon so charmingly put it. Hades personally found it pointless to sit around on a throne all day when there were people to be saved. Not that they ever really quite appreciated his efforts (being dead and all), but he did think they’d learned a serious lesson in why fucking with the basic tenants of human decency was a bad idea. To say the least._

_It was the fall equinox topside, the days starting to shift towards the short side, the nights starting to have a bite, and the temporary housing on the River Styx was already packed with the beginnings of the winter influx._

_Hades was out near Epsilon house, helping Charon to arrange the boarding passes for a little old lady who’d murdered her daughter and buried her in the flower garden and a clown who’d been shot by a trigger-happy mobster with a thing against the profession. He was tempted to send them both to Tartarus, but the clown was getting a one way ticket to Elysium, while Mrs. Hempstead was being assigned to CKD01._

_He’d just taken a brief break to check back with records, when a breath of fresh air swept past him, ruffling his hair and leaving behind a smell that wasn’t generally found in a graveyard. Which made him tense, whirl and generally look very menacing in a rather unfocused way, because there was no such thing as spring in his realm, no matter what Demeter muttered when she thought he wasn’t listening._

_Hades’ menace found a focus in the blonde woman standing behind him, her dress a glaringly bright white against the pointedly dull walls and buildings of the Underworld. There were even_ flowers _blooming underneath her feet, flowers that he was going to have to pull himself later just so the new arrivals didn’t get uppity ideas about what it was, exactly, an eternity of damnation entailed._

_“Persephone,” he sighed after they both spent a good five minutes staring at each other. “What are you doing down here?”_

_“Fall equinox? Hello?” She rolled her eyes and shifted her weight to rest on one leg. “Please tell me you didn’t forget I was coming.”_

_“I-” Hades began, and then was cut off._

_“Of_ course _you forgot, you always forget, it’s like you can acknowledge that_ whoa there are a ton more dead people down here right now _but somehow that doesn’t connect with the fact that_ Persephone’s coming because I let my dumbass of a brother feed her a fricking pomegranate. _”_

_“You done now?” Hades asked, a small smile tugging at the corners of his mouth._

_Persephone stood there quietly for a moment, apparently thinking.“Yes, I suppose I am.”_

_“Your mother’s not watching anymore?”_

_“No, I think she’s suitably convinced that I hate it down here.” The last was said with a wry grin and a deliberate twinkle in her eye._

_Demeter might hate the fact that Persephone was contracted to live in Hades’ realm for a good half of the year, but Demeter was not her daughter. Though she was the daughter of the Goddess of Spring, Persephone had a slightly militant bent towards those who’d done grievous wrong that made her an asset during the fall and winter months. Vaguely ironic, since it was Demeter’s doing that made her so useful, but Hades wasn’t complaining._

_“Now,” she said, walking towards him after a quick wave of her hand changed her clothes to the black leathers of Hades’ operatives, “where is my husband?”_

_“Wrangling a clown,” he replied as she reached him and they both began walking back towards the house where Charon, the clown, and the deadly granny were waiting. “I’m sure he’ll be thrilled to see you.”_

_Persephone laughed at that, head thrown back and blonde hair flying._

_“Not as thrilled as you are,” she said after she’d calmed down slightly._

_“What can I say, Seph? He’s a bitch to live with when you aren’t here.”_

xXxXx

_Present day—Earth  
Las Vegas, Nevada_

When Dean wakes up, it’s six-fifteen and Sam still isn’t back yet.

He refuses to worry about it, rationalizing that he could just be late, could have gotten as caught up as Dean had and simply hadn’t been able to wrest himself free as fast. But then the clock ticks slowly downwards towards seven and he’s had enough.

There’s a brief moment where he pats himself down, making sure money,  wallet, keys, everything that he’d need if forced to bail out fast is on him. And then he’s out the door, down the hall retracing Sam’s steps from earlier. Once Dean’s made it through the seemingly eternal elevator ride down to the parking garage, he’s out and searching, head making slow scans left and right, searching for any signs of his brother.

He comes up to the Impala, her paint a blue-black in the florescent lighting. The space next to her, the place that should have been filled with Sam’s Mustang, is empty. Which means that Sam could literally be anywhere in the city at the moment, and Dean doesn’t have a damn clue where to start looking. There’s a short moment of panic, hands going up to run through his hair, then scrub down his face as he tries to _think_.

Tries and fails.

He honestly hasn’t had to deal with something like this since John left for good, since Sam graduated, and he finally was able to get himself into school. Being a structural engineer, however eccentric, didn’t prepare him to have to jump back into the old life, where every shadow was an enemy, and cheap motels were the best bet because staying more than one night was a good way to get shot.

Dean sighs, and pulls out his keys, sliding them around the ring until he finds the one that’ll open the trunk. It’s different from the one that opens the doors, which is different from the one that’ll turn the ignition. He might have finally escaped his father’s paranoia, but it doesn’t mean he hadn’t had a point. He fits the key in the lock, twists until the lid pops, and then pulls them out. Dean pushes the lid of the trunk all the way up, and then reaches down underneath the debris collected over years and pulls up a padlock attached to a loop bolted to the frame of the car. Yet another key goes in that lock, and then he’s twisting the padlock off and pulling up the false bottom of the Impala’s trunk for the first time in nearly a decade. The sawed-off shotgun is still there, and Dean puts it up as a brace for the heavy panel out of instinct, his brain only registering the action a few moments later, after his eyes had thoroughly swept the contents of his baby’s trunk, making sure everything he might need was there and in the place he remembered it being.

The holy water in the bottles tucked into the pockets on the underside of the lid hasn’t dried up, and from what he can tell he’s still well supplied in silver bullets. He pulls out a box of them and tucks it into the pocket of his jacket, and then pulls out a gun and some oil and sets to cleaning it. Dean may not have done this in a while, but the motions are nearly automatic, repeated nearly nightly for over a decade as he and Sam were dragged cross country by John, each of them learning more about how to deadeye in a windstorm than anything truly academic.

After the handgun is clean, Dean mucks around in the trunk a little more until he finds a shoulder holster and a knife he remembers using to kill…well. Something unpleasant. He’s been trying to keep the thoughts of just what, exactly, John was hunting down in the American heartland, but with Sam missing in the city that helped give sin in the west a name, Dean realizes that he can’t avoid the truth for long.

The lid drops, the padlock goes back on and the trunk closes, and then it’s time for the awkward shifting dance that allows him to pull on the shoulder holster and settle his jacket back over it. The keys are held between his teeth as he does this, and they drop into his hand afterwards with a rattling clank. There are three more locks between him and the ignition and he takes care of them all, finally sliding into the driver’s seat of his baby and slamming the door behind him.

It’s uncomfortably warm in those first few moments, as the air conditioner blasts and Dean tries to figure out where in hell he was going to start looking. If this had happened years ago, before John had left, he would’ve simply pulled out the gris-gris John kept in the glove compartment, one for each of them. A little blood, a few lines of Cajun French, and he would have been in business. But he’d gotten rid of those after John was dead and Sammy went to school, a simple message to himself that he could _let go_ , unlike his father.

Dean settles for a slow crawl down the strip and a deep appreciation for the nagging feeling in his gut that has gotten him out of more shit that he can count. Four hours later he’s finally getting marginally frustrated, but he tamps that down and keeps searching, the need to make sure Sam’s all right more important than whatever annoyance he might feel at the fact that Las Vegas is freaking huge.

He thinks it might be the first time he’s ever felt the slightest inkling of hatred towards the city. The thought causes him to let out a sharp snort, one that’s quickly cut off by a flash of light in a previously dark alley to his left. There’s a honk from the car behind him as he swerves sharply in that direction and a shouted “What the hell do you think you’re doing, asshole?” but Dean’s too focused on getting the Impala turned off and himself out of the front seat. The fact that this might not be Sam, might not be anything out of the ordinary, just headlights flashing off a pane of glass doesn’t occur to him until he’s already at the mouth of the dark gap between buildings, gun locked and loaded at his side, the weight as familiar to him as breathing.

Dean’s half convinced himself that he’s right, that there’s nothing down here but rats and cockroaches when the flash comes again and he can see Sam hunched up against a wall, hair hanging down in front of his face, arm bent at an angle he _knows_ means it’s broken. Somebody’s standing in front of him, shape bulky in the light that illuminates him and Sam for mere moments. The only thing Dean can really tell about him, (at least he assumes it’s a “him”), is that he’s shorter than Sam is, which really isn’t much to go on. There are whole continents that are shorter than Sam is.

However, the distinguishing marks of a guy he’s never met before pale behind the fact that Sam’s arm is broken and the only person who’s near enough to be blamed for it is Bulky Dude. There’s that cold wash he gets when his brother’s been hurt, that icy rush that clears away everything except the fact that Sammy’s in danger and he’s going to stop it, no matter what. Sound fades away and tunnel vision is the name of his game and he doesn’t care that he’s leaving himself vulnerable, Dean’s striding down the alley, closing the distance between all of them, stealth or any other sort of covertness be damned.

Bulky Dude turns around as the light fades for a second time and Dean catches a glimpse of dark stubble and wide eyes, but he doesn’t care. When he’s close enough to reach, Dean hits him with a solid punch to the jaw, only feeling the slightest remorse at the sound of teeth clacking forcefully together as Bulky Dude falls to the ground and stays there.

Once he’s down, the noise of the night comes rushing back, including Sam’s groaned, “You really shouldn’t have done that.”

“Yeah,” Dean says, shaking his fist out and taking a closer look at Sam, cataloguing a scrape high on his cheek bone and a rip running down the left leg of his jeans in addition to the broken arm. “I really should’ve. The arm broken?”

Sam nods, the sweat on his face the only sign things were more than marginally wrong.

“How bad?” was Dean’s next question, stepping forward after he puts his gun back in its holster to help slide Sam’s jacket off so they could both get a better look.

“Not as bad as Tulsa,” Sam says, a slight wincing coming through as Dean tugs a little too hard near his elbow, “but not as good as San Pedro.”

“And,” he continues as the jacket came off and his arm just hangs there limply, “I think it’s dislocated to boot.”

“Shit,” Dean mutters, eyes going up to meet Sam’s, both of them aware of the fact that the wrenching pull he’d have to use to put Sam’s arm back in socket would make the break worse, and unlike normal cases of dislocation, the pain wouldn’t mostly go away once it was.

“This is going to hurt,” Dean says and Sam snorts.

“Tell me something I _don’t_ know.”

“This one time, when you were in high school—“ Dean starts, a grin spreading across his face as Sam’s good arm comes up to cuff him across the back of the head. “What, you asked.”

“Don’t listen to me, I’m delirious with pain,” Sam says, and Dean’s grin holds. There’s a sort of unspoken agreement after that, and Sam shifts enough so Dean can get a good hold on both sides of his shoulder.

“You ready?” he asks, hands resting lightly against Sam’s shirt.

“Yeah, yeah, just get it over wi—” Sam’s reply is cut off by a low moan and a grinding crunch as Dean slams his shoulder back into place. He goes down, back sliding against the brick of the building behind him until he sits with a thud Dean is sure is still perceivable even though they’re outside. A string of muttered cuss words comes next, but Dean doesn’t take them personally; if it had been him, the expletives would have been shouted at the top of his lungs and in several languages.

“You okay there, little brother?” Dean asks when the curse words have slowed to a drawn out “fuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuck” every five minutes or so.

“I’m not dead, that’s about all I can say.”

“Hey, not dead is good. Not that I’ve ever done dead, but from all accounts it doesn’t seem to have the greatest refund plan.”

“Not funny, Dean.”

“I think I’m hilarious.”

“You also think you’re Batman.”

“I _am_ Batman.”

“Somebody tell Christian Bale.”

“I ha—“

Their exchange is cut off by a quiet whimper from behind Dean’s back, and he realizes that he’s completely forgotten about Bulky Dude in his relief that Sam’s at least semi-alright. He twists his head around in tandem with Sam’s, the both of them looking towards the source of the sound. Bulky Dude’s back on his feet, and Dean can see that most of his bulk comes from a trenchcoat that’s wildly out of place in the desert of Nevada. Not that he can talk with his leather jacket and all, but this person _hurt Sam_ so he feels like he can make all the hypocritical remarks he wants.

“You hit me,” is the first thing Not-So-Bulky Dude says, eyes black holes in the shadows of Vegas at night, her bright lights not reaching quite this far.

“You hit my brother,” Dean says flatly, his logic perfectly sound in his own mind and not budging.

“Yes, but _you_ hit _me_ ,” Not-So-Bulky Dude repeats, putting odd emphasis on the pronouns.

“Yeah, and? I told you, _you hit my brother_. You’re lucky I didn’t do worse,” Dean replies, adding exasperation to the long list of emotions bubbling underneath the surface of his skin, the feeling coming from the fact that this guy didn’t seem to be getting the point. Shifting his emphasis onto different words wasn’t going to change things, and to be honest, he was seriously considering clocking Trenchcoat Guy again just for kicks.

“But— ” The guy starts again, and Dean’s fist starts to come together, fingers curling and twisting up under his palm, arm muscles tensing in preparation to be let fly at a certain shadowy face.

They’re both stopped by the rasp of Sam’s voice, echoing oddly in a rare break from noise of the traffic going by on the streets on either sound of the alleyway. “Cas, he doesn’t know.” Dean’s head does a double snap, whipping to look at his brother, who’s staring at the both of them like he’s a human stuck on the wrong side of a lion’s cage, and then back to look at _Cas_.

“But how—” He’s saying, stepping forward so that the shadows fall even more dramatically over his face but Dean’s voice overpowers his, rising to a low shout and staying there. “Sam, you’re saying you _know_ this joker?”

Sam shoves himself off the ground and stands with only a slight wobble, and then walks forward to stand between Dean and Cas, leaving the echo of Dean’s voice to reverberate through the narrow space as he does so. Dean’s tempted to shout a bit more, but he really doesn’t have a reason, apart from the fact that he _wants_ to. Besides, he’s supposed to help Sam feel better, not blow his ear drums up because he hasn’t told Dean everything that’s been going on in his life since he left for college.

“Dean,” Sam says, only panting slightly. “Meet Cas. Cas--” and Dean can _hear_ the pause as Sam looks at Cas with an expression he can only describe as _shut the hell up_ , “—meet Dean.”

Cas nods at Dean after Sam’s words, a slight twist in his neck causing the black pits where his eyes were to still look Dean head on, even as his head moves closer to the ground.

Dean barely manages to force his head to nod slightly before he snaps, “Now that we’ve gotten that out of the way, can someone please tell me what the hell is going on?”

“Dean,” Sam sighs, and it _is_ a sigh, complete with overloud breath and the heaving up and down of the shoulder that hadn’t been dislocated.

“What, Sam? I don’t think it’s an unreasonable request, the guy was _beating you up_ and—”

“It’s not that simple,” Sam interrupts and Dean can’t take standing still any more. He turns and paces down the shadowed asphalt of the alleyway, and into the edges of the light cast by the signs of the stores outside of it, hands going up to scrub through his hair and down his face. When he turns back, Sam and Cas are looking at each other, a silent conversation flying between the two of them, words carried on hand gestures and head jerks that are indecipherable to anyone outside.

“Okay,” he says, voice still raised enough to carry over the extra distance. “Stop doing the mime act and tell me what’s going on.”

Sam looks at him, then slides his eyes to Cas and shrugs.

“I met Cas…a long time ago,” he finally says, walking closer to Dean--leaving Cas behind to stand almost forlornly in the half black of the shadows--so that neither of them has to shout at the other.

“And you became such great friends you’ll let him dislocate and break your arm for shits and giggles?”

Sam glares at him as he comes to a stop just inside the light’s boundary on the dark street, Sam turning to look at the stream of occasional cars rushing by, with Dean keeping his front firmly facing Cas, not willing to turn his back on him just yet. “Shut up, Dean, and let me finish.”

“Okay, okay, you and trenchcoat dude meet in eons past, have a bonding experience, and meet up every once in a while so he can whale on you, what comes next?” Dean asks, rolling his eyes.

“Then comes the part your brother seems to think you’ll find difficult to believe.” Cas’ voice comes from right behind Dean, which, he isn’t afraid to admit to himself, scares the shit out of him. He also tells himself that that’s why he’s now half in the main road, gun pulled back out of its holster with his thumb fingering the safety, breath whooshing in and out of his lungs in an erratic counterpart to his heartbeat.

“You wanna cool it on the appearing out of nowhere shit?” he bites out, ridiculously proud of the fact that his voice stays steady.  “How the hell did you even get up here, anyway? You were twenty feet back five seconds ago, and now you’re _behind_ me?”

Cas is still facing the alleyway, his alignment not have adjusted to the fact that Dean is now behind _him_ , causing his voice to still carry a small hint of echo. “I initially disagreed, but now I can see why Sam might think you weren’t…ready to learn—”

“ _Cas_ ,” Sam interrupts, voice dropping to a low hiss on the last syllable, the expression on his face slightly desperate. “You don’t know what it’ll do, don’t know why we—”

“It doesn’t _matter_ , Sam,” Cas says, and there’s that flash of white light again, illuminating the alley and Cas’ back. Dean notes absently that he’s got a messy crop of brown-black hair on the way to adding that flash to the long list of questions he already has.

“He has no choice, _I_ have no choice.” With that last outburst, he turns to look at Sam, trenchcoat flapping, the movement throwing his face fully into the light for the first time. “You should have told me, should have let me know that I would find _this_ instead of what I needed—”

There was more, but Dean’s not paying attention, all of his attention focused on the increasingly angry man in front of him, sound dropping away until the world is seemingly silent, Sam and Cas’ mouths flapping aimlessly in air that refuses to carry their words. Images from months of dreams are bubbling up, flashes of black and flickering blue coalescing themselves to mirror the man in front of him. The next time the white flash comes as Cas flings his arms up, Dean can see arches of black on the walls behind him, arches that are far too large, too soft and distorted to be the shadows of his arms. Battle is next, and blood, quick snippets of bright steel and flying blood, and a high chorus that hums above it all, the words both encouragement and instructions, instructions Dean knows to the core of his being, because—and there’s the final revelation, the one he’s been fighting for a little more than half a year—because he wrote them.

Sound rushes back with a burst, and Dean’s left gasping to the side, forgotten in the heat of Cas and Sam’s argument. He’s vaguely thankful for that, glad that he has time to process, time to scream and melt down and curse at fate for being a fickle bitch. He’s still a little fuzzy on everything, the rush of images— _memory_ , his brain corrects—still too much to fully process, but he’s got Sam down pat, always has, and Cas is coming a close second.

He laughs, because apparently he _knows_ the bastard, has almost always known him, has fought with him, laughed with him…loved with him. Dean pauses on that last one, poking at the ball of feeling that don’t seem _quite_ his, not yet, and yes, that’s what it is. Love. Love for this quietly forceful man who can wield a sword like he was born with it, and can make battle look like a dance, a dance that although beautiful, has the unfortunate side effect of leaving his partners bleeding on the floor, eyes glassy and muscles permanently still. Next to him, caught in glimpses on breastplates and swords, Dean can see himself, twisting and dancing alongside Cas, his movements, though executed with a little less flair, just as deadly.

Something’s still nagging at Dean though, something strong enough to distract him from the rest of the things tumbling through his mind, allowing him to rise slightly above the surface of the burgeoning memories into a brief clear space where Dean can _think_. He realizes, after a moment, that it’s his name that’s niggling at the back of his mind, the fact that Cas rings true as his name, even that is missing something, isn’t quite complete.

Suddenly, in the whirl of his own thoughts and the frenzy of the argument still going on next to him, there is a still moment, where either Sam or Cas pauses for breath and Dean can take a break from fighting his own subconscious and drift peacefully on the river of his own mind.

There, in the center of the flow, is his name, rising out of the water like Arthur’s Excalibur, but he could give two shits about his name and all it entailed. There was a reason he’d dammed the bloody thing up, pushed back millennia of experiences to nothing more than fodder for dreams that were supposed to drift away upon wakefulness, and just because the dam had broken didn’t mean the reasons for its formation had changed. Next to his name is Sam’s, its shape charred and burnt, part of it sheared away, leaving the word permanently disfigured, the damage irreparable. Not that Sam wanted to repair it, seeing as he’d taken the flaming sword and hacked away at his name himself, the self-amputation a message that hadn’t been ignored.

Behind both Sam and Dean’s names rose a third, the edifice shining brightly in contrast to the dusty and broken ones that belonged to the Winchesters. Dean could almost make out what it said, even found himself leaning forward, as if movement in reality would help make the constructs of the mind more legible. It finally coalesces at the edge of the silence, the letters stark against the background of Dean’s mind.

“Castiel,” he breathes into that last moment of calm, and both Sam and Cas turn to look at him, Sam’s expression pained and Cas’ a cross between joy and regret.

“Hello, Dean,” Cas says, and then the quiet is broken and Dean’s swept away by the current, his body falling with a thud he doesn’t feel.

xXxXx

_Chapter Three: Castiel_

xXxXx

 

_Present day—Earth  
Las Vegas, Nevada_

Ever since he was created a few hundred millennia so ago, Hades—or as he was known in later years, Michael—had infuriated Castiel like no other. Whether by word or by deed, the man had always managed to worm his way under Cas’ skin and drive him up the goddamn wall. Now, a little over three centuries since he’d seen him last, he’s staring at the slumped form of Michael on the dirty asphalt of Las Vegas, Nevada and wondering how they ever got to this point. Lucifer—No, _Sam_ , he corrects himself, and Michael is Dean—is standing right next to him, looking mildly concerned about the fact that his brother was currently senseless.

“Did you think this would happen?” he asks, not taking his eyes off Dean’s body.

“Not really, no,” Sam says, shifting slightly on his feet.

“Not really?”

“Well, I didn’t think _you_ would be here.”

“Ah.”

“Yeah, it complicated things.”

“Did it indeed.”

“Just a bit. Not that he wasn’t going to remember eventually, he always does, but I was hoping to…”

“Ease him into it?”

“Something like that.” Sam turns to look at Cas, mouth quirked into a wry smile. “It’s nice to see you, Cas. It’s…been a while.”

Cas just looks back at him, not saying anything. He may have locked that bit of him away, may have reformed and changed, but Cas couldn’t forget that Sam was Lucifer, ruler of Hell and rebel against God.

“How long have you known?” He finally asks, resisting the urge to cross his arms across his chest, to shift away from the large, lean, teddy bear of a man who’d been known to eviscerate souls just for the hell of it.

“Since I left Stanford. Something about the world of criminal justice in America just…brought out the devil in me,” Sam grins at Cas, then refocuses on Dean. “We’d better get him back to Ceasar’s. You still full up on angel mojo?”

“Haven’t hit empty since 9/11,” Cas says absently, kneeling so he can press the palm of his hand to Dean’s forehead.  Looking back at Sam, he asks, “You coming?”

“I’ll be along,” Sam says, flapping his hand at Cas while starting to walk away. “I’ve got to pick up Dean’s baby and the Mustang, can’t leave ‘em out here for the chop shop boys.”

He nods, and closes his eyes, world going dark as his wings arch up out of the ether and then come down with a sharp snap that whisks them both away into the night, leaving Sam alone in the alley, looking simple and harmless in the light from the strip.

xXxXx

A few hours later, Dean’s settled into his bed and Cas is perched on the back of the couch, scrolling through the channels, trenchcoat tossed in a heap next to him. Sam isn’t back yet, which makes him think that maybe the chop shop boys had already gone to work and that he’s relatively glad he isn’t on Guardian duty tonight. It was one thing to go up against human or even garden variety supernatural criminals, but the Devil Himself was another thing entirely.

He finally settles on ABC Family, which seems to be having yet another Harry Potter Weekend (supposedly in celebration of summer), and he manages to make it through a little over the front half of _Chamber of Secrets_ before the lock clicks and Sam’s pushing his way through the door. Dean hasn’t moved in all of this time, which is slightly worrying, but not to the point of actual panic.

Sam stumps past him, sock feet somehow heavy against the soft carpet, and goes into the bathroom, the door closing behind him as the shower kicks on. Cas goes back to his movie, still waiting for Dean to wake up. Twenty minutes after Sam gets out of the shower and joins Cas on the couch, and just as Harry’s about to get run over by the Knight Bus in _Prisoner of Azkaban_ , there’s a groan from the bed behind them. Both of their heads turn with an almost audible grind of overstressed bone to see Dean sitting up in bed, legs pulled into a loose jumble, head held in his hands.

“You’re awake,” Sam says, getting up off the couch to walk over to his own bed and sit on the edge, with Cas following him. Dean grunts in acknowledgement, but doesn’t look up. “So…,” Sam continues after a moment, “how’s your head?”

“Shut it, Lucy,” Dean growls, a bit of white light leaking from between his fingers. Sam and Cas share a look at this confirmation of him having regained that part of him that Cas was so familiar with, the part that he’d been running from for centuries now.

“So,” Dean finally says, raising his head to look at the both of them, “what’re you here for, Cas?”

Castiel sighs and does his best to look anywhere but at Dean. “Remember that whole ‘end of the world’ thing you two were so against?”

“You mean the one that put us first in different pantheons, and then on Earth as humans?” Sam says, switching his attention from Dean for the first time since he’d woken up. “You didn’t mention _that_ when you first came to talk to me.”

“And you better not be about to say what I think you’re going to say,” Dean adds, dropping his hands to his knees to glare at Cas.

“Raphael sent me to tell you—”  Cas starts, and then has to throw himself backwards, wings snapping out of nothingness to cover himself as the room around him explodes. A quick glance to the side tells him that Sam is doing the same thing; his wings still a shining white in the swirl of debris, even after his fall and separation from the Host. A sharp contrast to Castiel’s own pitch black wings, but he’d never commented on the odd dichotomy.  A moment later, the explosion calms down, the shockwave almost sucked back into its epicenter of Dean’s frame, still sitting on the hotel bed.

He looks up at Sam and Cas, a lopsided smile on his face, head tilted in a way Cas recognizes from countless glimpses caught in breastplates and shields as his superiors gave him instructions and he mentally took the leeway to think _are you fucking serious right now_.

Except whenever Dean had done it, it had meant that he was about to do something reckless and stupid that would result in massive amounts of blood and death and personal injury, all of it done to make the point that he was right, they were wrong, and if they asked him to end the world one more time, he would end them. That reaction was the main reason that Cas hadn’t wanted to deliver Raphael’s message, the other being that he didn’t think he could handle Dean looking at him without recognizing him, a millennia or more of history wiped out, his eyes a blank slate clear of the past.

“See,” Dean says pleasantly, getting up and using brisk strokes of his hands to clear the plaster dust off of his clothes, “that’s why I left.”

“Because you have a tendency to destroy dad’s place whenever you go?” Sam says dryly, picking bits of what Cas assumes was once the ceiling fan out of his wings.

“Don’t give me that, Sam,” Dean retorts, hands going up on his hips now that his clothes were at least mostly clean. “From what I remember, you destroyed a Hell of a lot more than I did.” He pauses for a moment, and then adds, “Pun intended.”

Cas groans, then plows on with his message. “As I was saying, before you decided to become an interior decorator—”

“Shitty job, by the way,” Sam cuts in.

“—Raphael sent me to tell you that the first seal has been broken. You don’t have a choice anymore,” Cas finishes.

“Fuck me,” Dean says after a moment, the words drawn out unnecessarily long. “Are they sure?”

“Somebody killed Jesus. Again,” Cas replies, voice flat. “They’re pretty sure.”

“They let him _out_?” Sam asks, tone a bit more than incredulous.

“They really didn’t have a choice,” Cas says, rolling his eyes. “You don’t say no to the son of God, even if he doesn’t remember that his dad is the Creator of All.”

“Wonderful,” Dean says, voice about as enthused as the Pope’s at a lesbian orgy. “So this is Raphael’s fault.”

“Which means,” Sam says, cracking his knuckles and shaking his wings out, dislodging the last of the dust. “We can kill him.”

Cas sighs, and mutters a short prayer, ignoring the looks he got from both Winchesters. Just because they thought God was dead didn’t mean he had to lose what little faith he had left. When he was finished, he refocuses on the two of them. “You cannot kill Raphael simply because he is, on occasion, a colossal idiot.”

“We can try,” Dean says hopefully.

“No,” Cas says, as firmly as he could manage.

Dean rolls his eyes, and then starts hunting for his jacket and boots in the now thoroughly trashed room, those being literally the only items of clothing Cas was able to wrestle off of him before giving up and just dumping him unceremoniously into the once-whole bed. Sam follows suit, snatching up two duffles from the floor and shaking chips of plaster and cracked wood off of them. Dean picks his jacket up off of a chair, and one boot from the couch a few feet away.

The matching shoe is clear across the room in the tiny sink of the kitchenette, but Dean simply pulls it out with a shrug and puts it on. The both of them are ready disturbingly fast, the amount of personal items they have with them painfully small, not that either of them seem to see a problem with this. “I guess we’re leaving?” Cas says, half to himself, and the statement is confirmed when Dean tosses a duffel bag in his direction and tells him to “hold this, angelface”.

Cas stares after him, wondering how much of himself he does remember, and how much is still locked up behind that self imposed wall. He shakes it off as the both of them stop in front of him, laden down with not very much at all.

“Well,” Sam says, “this is it.”

“Wait, hold up,” Dean says, digging in his jacket pocket and almost dropping his bag. He pulls out a wad of money a few moments later and hands it to Sam. “Now that’s everything.”

“Wha—,” Sam starts, only to be stopped by Dean.

“Uh-uh, little brother. It’s yours, you’re keeping it, there’s more where that came from, and no,” he grins, eyes sliding over to Cas, before flicking back to Sam, “I didn’t rob a bank.”

“Shall we go?” Cas asks, hands going up in preparation to flash both himself and the Winchesters out of Nevada—out of Earth, actually—and into Heaven.

Dean laughs, and side steps him, heading for the door on foot. Cas turns and looks at him in confusion as Sam looms over his shoulder. “Just because Raphael is an ass,” the younger Winchester says in a low voice, “doesn’t mean that Dean is going to do what he wants just because Jesus Christ is dead.”

Cas looked up at him, neck twisting and human joints popping. “How do you mean?” he asks.

“It’s all about free will,” Sam says as Dean goes out the door with an eyebrow roll that said _you coming, or what?_ “I’ve got it, and you two don’t quite have it to the extent where it can be called _free_. But Dean figured out a long time ago that all that meant was he had to do what _God_ said, and fuck anyone else who tried.” Sam looks down at Cas, after that, brows a bit crinkled. “He didn’t tell you that?”

“No,” Cas replies, starting to walk towards the door. “He neglected to mention it. If he had told me, had told me what it meant and what he was going to do…”

“Would you have followed him?” Sam asks, as they both exit the room, door locking behind them. They can see Dean at the elevator bay, bouncing ever so slightly on his heels.

“Followed him, or chained him to Heaven’s Gates, I still don’t know,” Cas answers, and the subject is dropped, his words not leaving much room for response.

xXxXx

When they hit the road, Cas finds himself in the Impala and more confused than he was to begin with.

They’re heading out of Vegas as fast as they can with the evening traffic and still crushing heat of the desert sun bringing everything down to a slow crawl. Iron Maiden is pounding out of the speakers, the heavy bass the only thing that’s remotely quick for miles. Dean’s pointed the car northeast, which confuses Cas even more than the fact that they’re stuck in traffic instead of taking flight (though he knows that if he brings it up, Dean will just make the music louder and neither of them will have eardrums by the time they get wherever it is they’re going).

Three hours later, though, when they’re just making city limits because of a pileup on the main road, he breaks.

“Why are we doing this?” he asks, trying to keep his tone at least mostly pleasant.

“Doing what?” Dean’s eyes remain on the road, looking up occasionally to check that Sam’s headlights are still in his rearview mirror.

“ _Driving_ ,” Cas replies, the emphasis slipping out whether he wanted it to or not.

“Because I like it,” Dean says. “Because up until a few hours ago, I still had a working mojo block and my baby was the only way to go. Because, and I don’t know if you’re aware of this, though I know you are, but hey, maybe you’ve forgotten, _I hate flying_.”

Cas sighs, and sits back a little further in his seat. “I was hoping you’d forgotten _that_ ,” he mutters. Dean’s laugh cracks out after that, riding above the wave of rock music still pouring from the speakers.

“Hardly,” he says when he can speak without cackling again. “Phobias tend to stick with you, memories be damned. Sam’s still got the clown thing.”

“From Gabriel?” Cas’ eyebrows go up. “I mean, that was a… _memorable_ All Hallows, but still…?”

“Yup, can’t stand ‘em.”

They sit in silence for a bit as the road opens up and the cars drop off, leaving only Sam and Dean, traveling straight in some sort of two car parade. It hits full dark not long after that, headlights cutting bright swaths across scrub and sand, and stars pinpricking across the sky before Cas asks, “Where are we going?”

“Candy Mountain,” Dean says, absently, before shaking himself. “No, seriously, we’re going home.”

“Home? I offered to take you home, you said n—,” Cas starts.

“Not Heaven,” Dean says over top of him, “Lawrence. Dad left some stuff there, and we need it. Not to mention the fact that we have no idea where Charon is, and Persephone will kick my ass if I don’t tell her where to find him.”

“You kept in contact?” Cas’ tone is hurt and he doesn’t care.

“If by contact you mean stumbled across her and Demeter’s bar on a hunt, yeah,” Dean says, and then looks over at Cas with a smile. “Not that I knew it was them until just now, though I’m sure they recognized me.”

“Your face is a hard one to forget,” Cas says quietly, refusing to go into any more detail.

“Either way,” Dean continues, eyes flicking briefly back to the road before focusing on Cas again. “We’re going to Lawrence first, for Dad’s stuff, and then up to the Dakotas to meet with the Harvelles, as they’re going now, to get our shit—”

“Dean, stop the car _now_ ,” Cas interrupts, voice panicked, eyes fixed on the road in front of them. Dean’s eyes follow his line of sight, and then he’s cursing and swerving in a screeching arc of protesting tires and overstressed brakes, trying to avoid the woman standing in the middle of the road.

They come to a stop with a grinding bang that results in Cas’ head hitting the dashboard rather harder than he thought possible of human gravity, and then he’s drifting in the blackness, Dean shouting in his ear as he fades.

xXxXx

_Right before the fall of Michael—Heaven  
Time Has Not Improved Heaven’s Views On Signage_

_Heaven was peace, solitude dressed in clouds of white and golden arches, a place of silence and meditation on the glory of Creation._

_Or so Castiel had been told when he was first made, so very long ago. He’d come to his own conclusion not long after that. Heaven was noise and chaos, laughter and clashing steel, the flap of wings, the whoosh of displaced air, and the pound of classic rock all coming together to make_ home _._

 _The last one didn’t even make sense to him, as rock hadn’t even been invented yet, let alone been around long enough to -be considered_ classic _, but that’s what Michael called it, and the whole garrison learned to shut up about it. Speaking of Michael, Castiel was looking for him, as he had orders in the form of a scroll tucked under his arm to deliver to the leader of Heaven’s might._

_He found him in the training yard, engaging in a melee brawl with about twenty of the new recruits. God may have stopped making angels, but that didn’t stop humans from wanting to protect those of their kind still left on earth. And so Michael fought with them, wings and sword and fists flying in a potentially deadly whirl, giving them all a taste of what a battle against a demon would feel like for those who had never had wings._

_When he caught a glimpse of Castiel on the sidelines, Michael grinned, green eyes flashing in Heaven’s perpetual sun, then dropped to one leg and swept all of the recruits legs out from under them, felling them into a clanking pile of armor and blunted weapons. A snap and his wings had disappeared back into the ether, and he was sidestepping limbs and faces to get to Castiel’s side._

_“Promising, aren’t they?” he said, looking down to meet Castiel’s eyes._

_“They won’t kill themselves, at least,” Castiel replied, mouth twitching slightly upwards._

_“Eh, I think they’re a bit better than that. Pity the Romans keep going downstairs though, they can_ really _fight.”_

_“Beyond your obsession with acquiring a Roman, I have something for you.”_

_“Is it a Roman?” Michael asked, perking up slightly._

_“Nothing so fun,” Castiel said, pulling the orders out from under his arm and handing them to Michael. The other angel broke the seal and read, face becoming stiller and stiller with every line. When he was done, he slowly rolled the scroll back up and shoved it in his belt. Michael grinned at Castiel, but even he could see that it was forced._

_“What did it say?” Castiel asked, almost hesitantly._

_“Nothing, angelface,” Michael responded, voice distracted as he glanced to either side of Castiel. Castiel himself followed suit, and saw no one other than the last straggling trainee, the pile having broken up for the day after it became apparent that Michael wasn’t interested in beating the shit out of them any longer. They both watched her leave, neither speaking until the last tendril of her long red hair disappeared around the columned doorway that led to the women’s locker room._

_When she was gone, Castiel looked back up at Michael, eyebrows furrowed. “Nothing doesn’t make you call me angelface,” he commented, and this time Michael’s grin is genuine._

_“No,” Michael acknowledged, a hand going up to slide through the hair on the back of Castiel’s head, before tugging lightly near the top, tilting Castiel’s head back even further. “But this does.” He lowered his mouth to Castiel’s, holding it there for a long moment, both of them standing still, all feeling centered on the small space they were connected. Before Castiel could flick his tongue over Michael’s lips, or escalate the kiss in any way at all, Michael pulled away with a tug on Castiel’s hair, leaving him breathing heavy from built up tension._

_“Later, angelface,” Michael said with a small smile, then snapped his wings out of the ether and pushed off from the floor with a powerful rush of wind, leaving Castiel to stare after him as he shrunk into a small dot in Heaven’s perfect blue sky._

_It’s only a few hours later, as Castiel realizes the oddity of Michael willingly flying anywhere, that he starts to think something might be wrong. The next day he learns that the Archangel Michael has fallen to Earth in defiance of orders to initiate Armageddon, orders passed down from the Most High Himself._

_The news leaves him numb and Castiel the angel falls into a white haze he hopes he never wakes up from._

xXxXx

_Present Day—Earth  
Somewhere Northeast of Las Vegas, Nevada_

“ _CAS_ ”

The word breaks through his haze, and Cas flinches, muttering a short “Leave me alone, Gabriel.” The haze starts to rush back in, washing over his mind, before it’s shaken away by forceful hands that refuse to let go of him. Cas screws his eyes shut in resistance, the strain causing white bursts to f lash across his vision.

“ _CASTIEL, ANGEL OF THE LORD, AND GENERAL IN THE HOST OF MICHAEL THE ARCHANGEL, I COMMAND YOU TO WAKE THE FUCK UP BEFORE I SLAP YOU INTO NEXT WEEK_ ,” comes an angry voice above him, ringing with the authority of Heaven. “And God help me, Cas, if you leave me when I’ve just realized that I lost you, I will take back what I gave to my brother and make you suffer for it.”

Cas cracks one eye the smallest bit open he can muster. Gabriel, and even Anna, had tried this trick in the very beginning, trying to get him to come out of his own personal purgatory. He refuses to be fooled again, couldn’t take it. A blurry, slightly lopsided image swims into view, and then solidifies into the form of a very dirty, very angry, and very worried Dean Winchester.

“If that’s you playing Loki again, Gabriel,” Castiel rasps, “I will personally skin you when I don’t feel like such complete shit.”

“Not Gabe,” Dean says, and then leans down to kiss him. “Welcome back, angelface”

“Murmph,” Cas replies, then shifts a bit, only to discover that he’s flat out on his back on the black asphalt of the road.

“How—,” he begins, when Dean pulls back, but is distracted when the light that had been illuminating them is blocked out by a vaguely human figure, one that’s shorter and far curvier then Sam  would ever be.

“That’s how,” Dean says grimly as the figure squats down enough that the light washes over them all again, revealing her face.

“Ruby,” Cas says, starting to sit up, grabbing at Dean’s shoulder to help him through the last bit as the world starts to spin around him.

“Long time, no see,” the former demon says with a grin. “Didn’t mean to make y’all spin out like that, guess I thought maybe pretty boy had his eyes front for once.”

Dean glares at her, scowling. “You couldn’t have _called_?”

“Would you have picked up?” Ruby replies, eyebrow going up with her voice.

“Before I remembered you were a demon? Probably not,” Dean answers. “After? Definitely not. I’ve got enough problems, _Sam_ has got enough problems.”

Ruby’s mouth opens as if she was going to speak, and then she looks up and smiles widely. “Speak of the devil.”

“Hey, guys,” Sam says, looming into view on the opposite side of where Dean is sitting next to Cas. “Your head all right, man?”

“Just…peachy,” Cas grunts, as he tries to stand up, only to have to be braced by Dean’s arm as he makes the journey to full vertical. “Any particular reason _why_ my head had to make high speed contact with the dashboard?”

“Rubes was just getting around to explaining that, wasn’t she,” Dean says with a very pointed look in her direction.

Ruby sighs, and rolls her eyes. “Fine. Missouri sent us.”

“Us?” All three men say in unison, confusion rampant in the night air.

“What, you thought I decided standing alone in the middle of mostly deserted roads waiting for classic cars to run me over was my idea of fun?” Ruby scoffs, and looks up at Sam, who seems to be saying more with his eyes than either Cas or Dean can read. “Jess is here with me, Sam.”

“Both Jess and you,” Sam starts, and then stops. Ruby nods, and there’s more unspoken words that leave Cas and Dean staring at each other in confusion and mild boredom.

“So great, both you and Jess are here, awesome,” Dean says finally, breaking the silence. “Still doesn’t explain who Missouri is, or why both of my brother’s supposedly _human_ girlfriends are both part of the world we tried to leave behind.”

“What can I say, Sam’s got a nice ass,” Ruby says, offhand, before getting serious. “Missouri is what Cassandra’s calling herself these days. She heard about Cas’ message, decided that it was really fucking dumb to let you lot try and figure this out on your own, so she sent me and Jess down to drag you to the Roadhouse if you weren’t already going. Problem is, she didn’t give us a time frame, so we’ve been chilling at the Bellagio for nearly three months, waiting for the two of you to roll into town.”

“And when you did, you decided to run the majority of us off the road,” Dean says after she finishes.

“Pretty much,” Ruby says, her smile a sharp line across her face.

“Now we’ve got three cars in this lovely caravan of ours,” Cas says, wincing as blood pounds through his bruised head, angel mojo no good on his own body. Something about God wanting his creations to feel pain because it was good for them, he didn’t know, Uriel had explained it eons ago and Cas had thought it was stupid then, and he wasn’t going to change his opinion now.

He turns to Dean. “Are you _sure_ we can’t just fly there? It’s now one angel per car, and it’s not like it takes that lo—”

“Sorry, Cas,” Dean says, cheek brushing Cas’ hair as he turns to look at him, arm still solidly holding him up even though Cas thinks he can manage on his own now. “Can’t do it, and besides, I like the scenic route.”

“You like torturing me,” Cas grumbles, but stays silent after that as they make plans to keep driving and meet up with Ruby and Jess in the next town that has a motel that charges by something other than the hour. He’s bundled back into the car, followed shortly by Dean, who takes a brief moment to scrutinize his brother in the rear view mirror, who’s talking to Ruby in the light from the Mustang’s headlights, then guns it and shoots down the long flat expanse of road, the Impala no worse for wear after her long skid and Cas’ accidental abuse of her interior.

He falls asleep on that ride, and doesn’t wake again until he’s in a motel room in what he’s told is Idaho, sunlight coming in through the curtained windows with the strength afforded by midday.

xXxXx

_Chapter Four: Interlude_

xXxXx

_Two months ago—Earth  
Sioux Falls, South Dakota_

Bobby Singer thought he might have to fire the new guy.

Actually, he hoped he could fire the new guy, because God in Heaven was the man annoying. But he’s a halfway decent mechanic, so he couldn’t just do it on incompetence. He’s waiting, is what he told himself in justification, waiting for him to slip up and accidentally do something wrong just so he could fire him without a guilty conscience.

Not that the rest of the garage will be happy, Gabriel’s made friends with all of them, but Bobby wasn’t there to serve his mechanics, he’s there to serve his customers, their cars, and ultimately himself. And a mechanic who spends half of his days pulling pranks on his coworkers wasn’t one he wanted to keep around.

A knock came on his door, and he’s knocked out of his musings of violent expulsion from employment.

“Come in,” he barked, voice gruff.

Ellen’s friend from the bar, Cassie, slid in, hair up in a frizzy mass of curls today, ends brushing the sides of the door and doorframe in the meager space it’s actually able to open, the rest of the radius blocked by stacks of files and other papers he’s assured are important but he can’t be arsed to actually do anything with.

“Hello, Bobby,” Cassie said, smiling widely. “Business good?”

“Yes,” Bobby said, eyes narrowing as he drew out the word to more than it’s originally prescribed single syllable. “What do you want, Cassie. Or should I say, what does Ellen want?”

“Nothing much,” Cassie replied, smile still in place and growing wider. “ She just wanted you to know that it’s started again, and the boys are going to be back in town soon.”

“ _Balls_ ,” Bobby said, half to himself. “Who says?”

“Missouri says.”

“ _Balls_ ,” Bobby repeated.

“One last thing,” Cassie added, starting to turn towards the door now that her message was delivered. “She says to get the Colt ready.”

“ _Fuck_ ,” said Bobby, abandoning his preferred curse word as the door closed behind Cassie’s back.

He sat there, lost in thought, but not lost enough to miss noticing Cassie and Gabriel chatting it up like old friends, faces the most animated he’s seen them both outside of chasing down a story or releasing a can of silly string into a neighboring mechanic’s face.

“Definitely going to have to fire that boy,” he muttered, before casting his eyes around on the paperwork scattered on his desk. “Or…there are fates worse than death.”

He got up from the desk and cracked open the door, shouting onto the floor. “Hey, Gabriel, if you’ve got time to chat with the pretty lady, you’ve got time to talk with me.”

Bobby turned back to the room and its choking clog of forms and files.

“Oh yes, worse fates indeed.”

~~~

_Two months ago—Earth  
Kripke’s Hollow, Ohio_

After eight years, Chuck Shurly was absolutely certain of exactly one thing: his editor was insane. Completely batshit. Other descriptive words he was paid to write down on a word document, but couldn’t summon to the front of his mind at the moment.

“You want me to what?” he asked for what felt like the sixth time, fingers pinching the bridge of his nose and eyes bouncing restlessly over the confines of his living room, searching for a bottle that actually still retained some liquid, instead of just being left behind in his wake because he couldn’t currently be arsed to bother throwing them away.

“I want you to kill them,” came Becky Rosen’s chipper voice down the line, a slight tapping echoing in the background.

“I can’t kill them,” Chuck said, finally spotting what looked like three fifths of whisky sitting in a listing bottle of Jack Daniel’s on the corner of his desk.

“Well, why not?” Becky said, the both of them aware that they’d already been over this, several times.

“Because, Becky,” Chuck swiped the bottle up and twisted the bottle off before gulping down a swallow, the burn barely even registering on the constantly abused tissues of his esophagus. “That’s not the way the story goes.”

“Well, your version is boring,” Becky replied, the tapping increasing in tempo.

“I’m sorry; I didn’t know deep moral dilemmas and darkening psychological states were boring. Isn’t that, like, the whole plot of _Breaking Bad_?”

“Maybe if that was what you’d started out with, Chuck, but I mean, even _Breaking Bad_ has the occasional exploding meth lab. You went from hunting demons and monsters in the dark, to suburbia and _law school_ ,” Becky shuddered and Chuck could hear the tapping skitter across the top of her desk before leveling out.

“I’m _sorry_ ,” Chuck said, eyes rolling and knocking back another deep swallow. “Sam and Dean do what they want, when they want. I can’t _make_ them do anything, much less kill them.”

“You know,” and now Becky sounded slightly exasperated, “Most authors don’t have this problem. Most authors can write like normal people. Most authors,” and here the tapping stopped and Chuck started to get slightly worried, “don’t tell me that they can’t do something because the characters refuse to allow it.”

“Yeah, well, most authors write sober,” Chuck muttered to himself, then said a quick “Nothing, nothing” to Becky’s squawked “ _WHAT?_ ”

“Well, then there’s no help for it,” Becky said to the tune of chair legs scraping across the floor. “I’m coming down there.”

“ _WHAT?_ ” It was Chucks turn to be shocked, to look around in horror at his living space and to realize that he could probably open a landfill right here with no changes necessary.

“Yes,” said Becky, determination laced through her voice. “I’ll be there tomorrow morning.”

“No, but, wait--!” Chuck said, but it was too late. The line was dead, a long single note drone his only accompaniment in the mess that was his house.

“ _Shit_ ,” he said to himself, then went to go find a trash bag.

~~~

_Two months ago—Earth  
Pontiac, Illinois_

Small town cops weren’t supposed to have to deal with shit like this. Hell, they were supposed to retire after thirty years without ever seeing a dead body, and only having fired their gun once at a raccoon to scare it away from Mrs. Liddell’s garbage.

Pontiac, Illinois, however, seemed determined to buck the trend, and Victor Henrikson was having none of it.

He stumped out of his house after dispatch finished telling him what had happened in a shaky voice, and slammed his way into his car, being certain to make as much noise as he possibly could, as if he could generate a sheer wall of sound that would protect him from what he had to go see, had to go do. His car started with a growl, and Henrikson grabbed the large magnet from the passenger seat that read “Pontiac Police Department”, rolled down the window and slapped it on the side of the door, not caring if it was straight or upside down.

A squeal of protesting tires, and he was out of the driveway and onto the road, police sirens silent. It was eight in the morning on a Sunday, everyone was at church, and the worst traffic they ever got was on the fourth of July, when Farmer Creighton tried to drive his tractor through the marching band section of the parade. Besides, there was no need to freak out the locals, who’d maybe only heard the police sirens once, and that when the Chief had accidentally hit the switch while trying to find her sunglasses.

Eighteen minutes later, Henrikson pulled up to the side of the road in what honestly felt like the middle of nowhere, and scanned the sky. Off in the distance, maybe about a quarter of a mile away, maybe less, a swirl of crows rose and fell in a hovering mass about thirty feet above the high grass. A deep swath was cut through where people had shoved their way through, the start of the trail coming out about six feet to Henrikson’s left.

Heaving a deep sigh, and feeling a distinct urge to mutter under his breath in the style of Murtagh, Henrikson got out of the car, slammed the door, and started to walk down the long path of crushed grass, the sides looming in his peripheral vision and making him jumpy. He reached a clearing soon enough, the open space full of people in state issued jumpsuits and very serious faces, though everyone seemed as unnerved by the location as Henrikson was.

In the center of it all, rising out of the ground in some sort of awful mockery of glory, was a cross fashioned from heavy, rough cut wood. There, on the crossbeams, thick nails slowly ripping holes in his hands, hung a man, his dark hair disheveled, his skin the purplish white of death.

Henrikson felt a shudder work its way down his spine, horror left over from Sunday afternoons in St. Andrew’s Cathedral bubbling up for the first time in years. His fingers twitched, beginning the reach to cross himself, but the gesture seemed somehow inappropriate here, wrong.

“Jesus Christ,” he breathed instead, his words mostly lost among the calls of crows and the nervous chatter of the crime scene techs.

“Not quite,” came a woman’s voice from behind him, devoid of its usual humour, even though she was clearly trying to crack a joke, to keep the mood light. Henrikson turned to see Pamela Barnes standing there, characteristic Ray-Bans firmly in place on the bridge of her nose, mouth pressed into a firm line.

“Who is it?” Henrikson managed to get out after a moment.

“Jimmy,” Pamela said heavily, “Jimmy Novak. Has that little girl who sings like an angel, been filling in for Father Macklepenny over at St. Bart’s.”

“Do they--,” Henrikson started, then stopped. Pamela shook her head, and he grimaced. He _really_ didn’t want to have to do this. Shoving the unpleasant duty of informing the Novak family of Jimmy’s death to the back of his mind, Henrikson tried to focus on the routine drudgery of analyzing a crime scene. “Do we have any idea who did this? Or why?”

Pamela shook her head again, then sighed. “We don’t know jack, which is odd, especially for a set-up like this. Doesn’t help that the feds are going to be rolling in soon, and we have shit to give them, not that they’re going to ask nicely.”

“The feds? How did they hear about this?” If Henrikson’s tone could get more disgusted, it would start dripping slime.

“They didn’t, they shouldn’t, and yet here they’ll be,” Pamela sounded resigned, and Henrikson took the proclamation in stride. Pontiac’s police chief didn’t often let slip that she was a damn good psychic, even to those inside the department. Not that he would have believed it even if it were common knowledge, but Henrikson had learned the hard way that when Pamela said something was going to happen, it was going to happen, no matter what was done to try and stop it.

“Who’s on this case?” Henrikson asked, changing the subject.

“You and Braeden, from us, and an Agent Milton from the Feebies,” Pamela cracked a small smile. “Fate has a sense of humour, it seems.”

Henrikson forced out a short laugh, and then went to go do his job, striding towards a dark haired woman who was standing at the foot of the cross, head tilted back into the flickering light that leaked through the mass of feathers and beaks that refused to disperse. The faster he and Braeden did this, the faster they could get the poor man down, death be damned.

He only prayed that Jimmy Novak was at peace, and that Agent Milton hauled ass.

xXxXx

_Chapter Five: Sam_

xXxXx

_Present Day—Earth  
Somewhere in Idaho_

The road to Idaho was long. And flat. And just generally irritating, especially since A) they didn’t need to be going through Idaho to begin with, and B) they could have been at the Roadhouse last night if Dean could just give up his ridiculous fear of flying, pull his wings out, and transport his damn car there, instead of insisting on driving it.

Instead here they are, three long examples of pure American muscle, tires eating up the length of Nevada in what looks to be completely bare desert. Add on the fact that they’re avoiding the shorter route through Utah because apparently Dean has an issue with it as well, and the entire journey approaches the realm of the ridiculous.

Sam had just rolled his eyes during the original discussion, but now he was quite willing to go back four hours and punch his brother in the face for making them take this route.

Though that isn’t quite what has Sam so jittery, even if he’d like to think so. He flicked his eyes up to the rear view mirror, making sure that Ruby’s Camaro was still behind him. It’d appeared out of the blackness about an hour ago, engine rumbling deep in the quiet night, headlights slightly blinding Sam before they switched down from the high beams.

He could see Ruby at the wheel, dark hair pulled into some sort of messy topknot that he couldn’t remember ever seeing on her before. Jess’ blond hair glinted at him faintly, reflecting the light of the Camaro’s instrument panel, her head leaning against the column of the door frame, eyes closed in sleep. Sam’s eyes met Ruby’s across the distance, and the accompanying jolt sent him back to thoughts of driving and keeping his wheels running smooth and straight on the seemingly endless stretch of black pavement

Issues of speed and transport were easier to deal with than dwelling on the fact that both of his wives were just a few car lengths behind him. Sam wasn’t even certain he could call them that anymore, and wasn’t sure if he still had some sort of claim on them, though apparently they still had one on him. He grinned at that, white teeth flashing in the darkness, memories of dark nights in New York and lazy mornings at Stanford flitting through his mind.

But thinking about it was pointless, and besides, he had more pressing issues to deal with than possible impending marital crises. Like the fact that Jesus was dead again, a bullet he’d thought he’d dodged the first time the dude had been sent downstairs and he’d patently refused to touch him. Can’t have the Righteous Man break in Hell if Hell hands him a Mojito and tells him “sit here, don’t touch anything, I’ve got to go have a chat with dear old dad”.

Three days of shouting later, and whoops, suddenly Jesus was back up at Dad’s right hand, and Sam had been able to relax just a tiny bit. Now, however, Jesus was in Hell for real, with a ruler who didn’t mind speeding up the end of the world, or pushing it and his brother to its inevitable conclusion. All of which amounted to nothing pleasant.

Sam rolled down the windows after that, and leaned heavy on the gas, the rush of the wind and the unhappy grumble of the engine pushing away thoughts of anything but going forward and following the sharp pinpricks of red that were the Impala’s tail lights.

~~~

When the sky started to pearl grey with the light of dawn, the Impala finally pulled off the road and into the parking lot of a motel that looks only slightly less sketchy than the Bates Motel, though Sam thought that’s only because it was on a semi-major highway, instead of the middle of mostly nowhere. Aside from that, the kindest words he could find to describe the place were “still standing” and “not on fire”.

He parked the Mustang next to the Impala, and then waited until the Camaro pulls in next to him to get out. Ruby and Dean got out at the same time, all of them doing the sort of stretch human beings are prone to do after a long drive, spines cracking and mouths opening wide in yawns that whispered through the morning air. Dean slouched off to where the front desk is, leaving Sam and Ruby to stare at each other over the roof of the Camaro as they waited for him to come back.

“She asleep?” Sam finally asked in a low voice, eyes flicking down to run over Jess. Her eyes were still closed, and her chest rose and fell with even breaths that said sleep to him, but he wanted to make sure.

“Yeah,” Ruby replied, voice equally low. “She doesn’t do well with the long journey stuff. Normally she conks out in the backseat, but this time…”

“What?

Ruby raised an eyebrow, and smiled slightly. “This time she didn’t want to let you out of her sight. Doesn’t quite make sense, but eh, who can blame her. You have a habit of disappearing.”

Sam grimaced.  He wished he could blame that on John, and the lifestyle he’d raised them in, wished he could blame it on school, on work, on anything but himself. But he couldn’t. He’d been running ever since Michael had come to him and told him of God’s plans, running from the whims of destiny and running from anything else that might tempt him to tie himself down, to enjoy the life he’d been given.

The first and only angel God had given complete free will, and he couldn’t make up his own damn mind. There was irony in that somewhere, but Dean came back with the keys and he shoved the thoughts out of his mind, focusing on more mundane matters.

“D’ya want me to carry her in?” Sam gestured at Jess, still snoozing away in the Camero, eyes on Ruby. A brief moment passed, and then she nodded. Sam embarked on the difficult task of extricating Jess from the tangle of her seat belt and the depth of the bucket seat, all without waking her up. Finally succeeding with a little help from Ruby, he hefted her in his arms and started walking towards the motel door, her long hair brushing slightly against his neck with every step.

Out of the corner of his eye, he could see Dean doing pretty much the same thing for Cas, but instead of lifting him Snow White style, his brother had heaved angel over his shoulder in some sort of half assed fireman’s carry. Sam rolled his eyes, and concentrated on not slamming Jess’ head into anything. Ruby went ahead and actually opened the door to the motel rooms, a slight smirk on her face when she caught a glimpse of Cas.

As Sam walked in, she started to rummage in her back pocket, and then pulled out a cell phone, her grin growing wider. He put Jess down on the bed to the sound of an automated camera click and Dean’s soft growl, followed shortly by Ruby’s laugh.

After he’d laid her out in what he hoped was a comfortable position, and Ruby and Dean had stopped sniping at each other long enough for Cas to be put on a bed of his own, there was a short conference, a flurried bout of whispers that eventually amounted to Dean standing watch and Ruby and Sam trying to get some modicum of sleep before they were on the move again.

What that meant was Dean stretched out on his bed, Cas’ head resting on his shoulder, booted feet stacked on top of each other and reruns of _Doctor Sexy, MD_ flickering in the corner. Sam and Ruby had a quick moment of confusion, and then came to a conclusion that involved Jess being shifted to the middle of the bed, and the both of them lying down on either side of her. Sam fell asleep with his eyes on Ruby’s, his breath coming even with hers and Jess’, his mind calmer than it had been for years.

He slept, but he didn’t dream.

~~~

When Sam woke, it was nearly noon, the long beams of the sun’s light coming in from high in the sky to slash across the air, long swaths of dancing dust caught in their radius.  One of the thick beams fell across his face and streamed across the length of the bed, catching the brighter gold highlights of Jess’ blonde strands and disappearing with a soft glow into Ruby’s dark locks as both women’s’ hair mixed and tangled on the pillows, the twist of light and dark a familiar pattern, if one Sam hadn’t seen in a long while.

He laid there for a long moment, watching both Jess and Ruby’s faces, the lines clean and unworried in the depths of slumber. Sam started to shift out of the bed, started to move towards the bathroom and get ready to face the day, when Jess’ eyes cracked slowly open, squinting slightly against the onslaught of light. She smiled, eyes crinkling at the corners as her mouth spread wide in happiness.

“Oberon,” she said, shocking Sam with the name, freezing him in place long enough for her to lean up and brush her lips across his. He started to deepen it, tongue flicking out to trace her bottom lip and hand going up to tangle in her hair and pull her closer, but was interrupted by a loud snort from the other side of the room. Sam twisted around by way of flopping on his back, Jess sprawling over him sleepily with a soft murmur, to see Dean sitting on the floor next to his bed, back up against the mattress, three guns in various states of disrepair scattered around him.

“What,” said Sam, mildly irritated, his hand going to smooth its way down Jess’ back and slightly lower, the heat of her body warming his palm.

“She called you Oberon, man,” Dean said, chuckling, fingers nimble on the gun in his hand, breaking it down and inspecting each piece. “I forgot you did a stint as King of the Fairies.”

“He looks very good in tights,” said Jess offhand, surprising a laugh out of Sam.

“The crown wasn’t bad either.” That was Ruby, a yawn creeping through the edges of her words.

“You actually wore the crown?” Dean looked up at the three of them, a grin causing his eyes to flash in the sunlight.

“He more than wore it,” said Ruby, shifting up and over so she was sitting up, cross legged on the bed next to Sam. “I think he used it to kill someone.”

“Oh, yes, that kelpie that wanted permission to eat all of the children in Brighton, and wouldn’t take no for an answer,” Jess said, sitting up herself and shoving her hair out of her eyes. “An awful mess it made, too, took him three days to get the throne room clean again.”

“All the while bitching about how if he’d had it his way, he’d resurrect the kelpie and force it to clean its own damn blood off the marble,” Ruby laughed, then leaned over to kiss Jess softly, their lips  catching, and then holding, the contact slow and sweet.

“Morning, Glory,” she said as she pulled away, and then looked to Sam as he said in a soft voice, “What’s the story?”

“The story is,” Ruby said, a grin hooking the side of her mouth and pulling up, “is that you’re looking scruffy for a king.”

“He had a broken arm last night,” said Dean from the floor as he racked a slide, the noise echoing a bit in the small room. “Though that’s no excuse for the hair.”

“Please,” said Jess as Sam finally sat up by way of sliding to the floor with a thump, his position a mirror of Dean’s, minus the scatter of firearms. “I seem to remember you with a rather impressive queue of hair in about, oh, five hundred B.C.”

“At least I never grew a beard,” Dean muttered, “Unlike angelface back here. Do you know how hard it is to convince an angel that having what amounts to a muskrat attached to his face isn’t attractive in the slightest?”

Sam laughed, the first real laugh he’d had in a long while, shoulders shaking as his mirth filled a small motel room in Idaho, the thought of his brother’s angel with a muskrat clinging to his face somehow the funniest thing he could ever envisage. He could hear Jess and Ruby whispering above his head, and Dean commenting from time to time, but even when the laughter died down Sam couldn’t keep the ridiculous smile off his face.

He supposed it was because, for the first time since John had died, he felt like his small little corner of the universe was just a tad bit whole again, even though the world as he’d known it was breaking up around him, shattering into smaller and smaller pieces by the day.

 _What was the world_ , Sam mused as Jess slipped off the bed and went into the bathroom and Ruby slid down off the bed to sit beside him, feet going up and arms wrapping their way around knees to clasp in the middle, _when you’ve got moments like these_.

He looked across the short space to see his thoughts echoed in Dean’s eyes, in the hooked grin that cut across his face,  an expression that was so similar to Ruby’s, and yet so different in all the ways that mattered. Sam and his brother had never fought for Earth, as a planet, or life as an ideal, or people as a mass, unknown collective. Their battles had always been for friends, for family, for moments like this, and the knowledge that if they kept fighting, whether in Heaven or Hell or any place in between, they preserve what they had, what they valued, and indirectly do the same for those around them.

God had made them that way, had set up the Angel Corps that way, so that they weren’t simply fighting for an ideal, or for what others had and they never could, but so that they were fighting for themselves. It was only when His plan veered away from that track, when traces of selfish intent and an uncaring view of his children began to leak through that Sam and Dean had fallen, though falling was only the end goal. Sam had already been ruling in Hell for a millennia before the decision was made, and now, in this sleepy Idaho town, he finally felt that he’d done it for all the right reasons.

A soft clack announced the fact that Jess was finished with her shower, and Ruby pressed a soft kiss to the top curve of Sam’s shoulder before getting up to take hers, trailing her fingers through Jess’ loose hair as she passed. Jess sat in Ruby’s place and pulled her hair over her shoulder, beginning to brush it through with her fingers, small droplets of water flying at the end of every stroke.

When it was mostly untangled, she looked up at Sam and offered the still damp mass in one hand with a smile. He took the gold strands in one hand and helped Jess get situated in front of him with the other, her back staying straight as he leaned against the bed, his legs stretching out on either side of hers, his toes almost brushing one of Dean’s guns. Sam divided the hair into three parts and braided it with quick twists of his wrists, nothing fancy, just a single long braid down the center of Jess’ back.

He’d gotten about three-quarters of the way through when a low moan came from Dean’s bed, and a sleepy Castiel rolled over to look at the three of them through one bleary eye, hair ruffled into what could only be described as a rats nest.

“Morning sunshine,” Dean said, head going slightly sideways so he could look at Cas and fiddle with the slide of a dismantled Glock.

“My head hurts,” was Cas’ reply, head dropping down to smack the mattress, causing the words to be muffled.

“That’s what happens when human skulls hit plastic at sixty miles an hour,” Dean said, chuckling. “Why don’t you do a spin out of the meatsuit if it hurts that bad?”

“You’re evil,” said Cas as he sat up fully, legs swinging down to rest beside Dean, another low groan creeping out again.

“Original King of Hell,” Dean agreed.

“You won’t kiss it, Dean, and make it better?” tossed out Jess, shoulders shaking slightly at the whole scene as Sam tied off her hair.

“Please,” Dean snorted, “Tylenol would do him more good than me.”

“I’ll take the kiss though,” Cas said, and thumped to the floor, sending a magazine of bullets skidding across the floor.

“Fine,” Dean said, after a long look to determine that Cas hadn’t shook anything during his drop, or had any lasting damage from last night’s shenanigans, and pulled him over and slightly across his lap for a long kiss. Sam looked away, trying to give his brother some sort of privacy, his eyes going to the small of Jess’ back and staying there.

Eventually Dean and Cas broke apart, and Ruby came out of the shower in a billow of steam. Following that, the five of them got up, Dean fitting the pieces of his gun back together, and Sam and Ruby packing up the few things they’d brought out from the cars. Twenty minutes later, and they were on the road, the mind numbing stretch of pavement and rhythm of the car almost lulling him to sleep, especially since there was no one in the passenger seat to keep him in any sort of company.

xXxXx

_About six hundred years ago—Fairie  
Summer Palace_

_In life, there were only two certainties. Summer would always fade to Winter (as well as the reverse), and those of Faerie could make even the smallest of functions the most worrisome affairs on the planet. Titania dropped her head onto her Council table with a heavy thunk that was inaudible over the arguments of her advisors and asked herself, again, why she’d ever agreed to do this._

_It wasn’t like being Queen of Summer was hereditary, or even a trial by combat sort of deal, with the new ruler rising to power in a pool of their predecessor’s blood. She left things like that to the Winter Queen, and her Court, where they honestly had more time for that sort of thing, and an easier time of cleaning the throne room. Titania had tried to clean blood off the light sandstone floors once, and then had realized that it had soaked into the porous stone and wasn’t going anywhere._

_When the argument raging all around her reached some sort of an ebb—not that she could remember, what, precisely the argument was about—Titania raised her head from its position on the table and said: “What is the Council’s opinion on the matter?”_

_All of them began to speak at once, all clearly in the mindset that what they had put forth was, truly, what the Council opined. She held up a hand in exasperation, and the onslaught of words stopped._

_“_ One _of you. One of you tell me what the whole Council has decided upon in the time you have had to discuss the issue.”_

_Eventually, about twenty minutes after that—minutes that were filled with much shouting, gesticulating, and a near smiting—a Kappa stood up near the end of the table and cleared her throat, the water in her head bowl sloshing slightly._

_“We have decided,” she said, voice carrying up the hall, “that although most of the Council is too self-absorbed to see straight, that it is, once again, a really fucking stupid idea to go to war with Winter.”_

_“Praise glory hallelujah,” Titania muttered, and then stood, bringing the rest of the Council up with her._

_“Then let it stand,” she said, trying not to seem impatient with the whole bloody ordeal, “that the Summer Court is officially adjourned. Fall Court will take charge in the interim as usual, and Winter Court takes control on the Equinox.”_

_Titania sighed, and looked around, then concluded her statement with a simple “Dismissed”._

_The members of the Council filed out, and she flopped back into her chair, the prospect of managing the Summer Court’s move to the Winter Residence looming large in her mind. She leaned forward on her elbows, pondering the issue and how she could keep the damn processes as painless as possible, but found herself leaning further and further forward until her head was resting on her forearms and her eyes had closed as her mind drifted into sleep._

xXxXx

_Maeve was going to kill him._

_Actually no, slaughtering was better. Took more time, was more personal, got her just that extra bit bloody, so she felt like she’d actually accomplished something, instead of just casually slicing through a grain sack._

_Either way, he was going to die._

_She stomped through the halls of what was now the Fall Court due to the yearly transition, the trail of her overcoat flapping slightly from the breeze of her passing. Maeve could never remember where things were in this bloody castle, especially since the Summer Court took a great deal of pleasure in moving signage before they left._

_Five turns and a stairwell later, she came across what appeared to be her council room, except mildly happy looking, and with significantly less chainmail lining the walls. The identity of the room was confirmed when she saw the sleeping woman at the head of the oval table that took up most of the middle of the room. Maeve knew those curls, would know them in the dark, or shorn clean by a lucky sword in battle._

_“One day,” she said, moving more quietly now, trying not to disturb her, “One day I’ll come to this bloody place and not find you propped up somewhere, exhausted.”_

_She reached the head of the table and reached out to lightly shake a shoulder._

_“C’mon, Titania, wake up. I’ve got people to kill, and damsels to kiss, and you’re not helping with either one of those quests,” she said in a sing song voice, then sighed as she got nothing. Maeve raised a finger, and a small ball of crackling blue light formed about the tip, snapping ever so often with tiny booms reminiscent of thunder. She touched the light to the bare part of Titania’s arm, and then the room was a blur as she was thrown back into the wall, a very sharp knife now pressed against her throat._

_“Does your Court know that their Summer Queen has a taste for violence?” Maeve said, doing her best to keep her throat from moving against the knife blade._

_“No, but they also know better than to wake me with fucking bottled lightning,” Titania said, her voice a soft growl._

_“Ah, but I can take the consequences,” Maeve replied, grinning, still trying to press her neck back from the blade that still hadn’t moved._

_“So go bother Oberon,” Titania grumbled, “He just finished negotiating with the Red Caps, should be all sorts of fun.”_

_“I’ll pass,” Maeve said as Titania finally eased up on the knife, stealing a quick kiss before moving to hop up on the table, legs swinging as she got herself settled._

_“So,” she continued as Titania settled back in the chair Maeve had so rudely awakened her from. “We’ve got killing to do. Or, we could always go for my favorite, slaughter.”_

_“Who is it this time?” Titania said, eyes rolling._

_“Azazel,” Maeve said, and then when Titania just stared at her, elaborated with, “the Changeling King.”_

xXxXx

_Chapter Six: Dean & Cas_

xXxXx

_Present Day—Earth  
Windom, Minnesota_

When Dean was eighteen and Sam was fourteen, he’d found John’s journal in the back end of the Impala’s trunk, buried beneath a tarp that had some sort of dark sticky residue he didn’t want to think about and a stack of stakes left over from one of John’s hunts. It hadn’t pulled his interest, wouldn’t have pulled his interest except for the fact that John had been gone for a week, hadn’t taken the car, wouldn’t pick up the phone, and Sam and Dean were about to run out of money, something that they, quite literally, couldn’t afford to have happen.

So he pulled it out, flipped through the pages, searching for any sign of any sort of contacts beyond the usual suspects, Bobby already being out of the mix, and found an address that simply read “Adam W./Windom, MN” in the title line. There was no phone number, but it wasn’t like Windom was too far away from where they were now, less than the ninety miles it would have been to drive up from Bobby’s house, and Dean had access to a car with full gas, even if he couldn’t exactly pay for the privilege of borrowing it.

Three hours later he was pulling up to a modest house in the suburbs, a house that had John’s truck parked outside of it and a kid a couple years younger than Sam swinging his legs from the tailgate, baseball cap stuck firmly on his head. Dean had almost gotten out of the car, almost gone up to the kid and asked if he knew a John Winchester, when John had come out of the front door, a woman following behind him, and it was obvious that this was a family, even if it was one that Dean wanted to deny existed.

He’d driven off after that, leaving John and the family he’d made apart from his sons behind and never looked  back, never talked to Sam about it because who needs to tell their little brother that their dad doesn’t love them as much as they thought. But now they were older, now they weren’t the humans that they should have been but instead the angels they’d always been, Dean needed his brother.

Both of them.

The ninety mile drive had been short, just Cas and Dean back in the Impala, with the others still at Bobby’s, resting after the three day drive from Idaho. He pulls up to the same house, the paint a bit more dingy then it had been before, the yard scraggly with weeds and tall grass, and he just sits there, engine idling, palms a bit sweaty as Cas looks at him in silence from the passenger seat.

“I don’t want to do this,” he says finally, staring out of the window.

“Why not?” Cas’ tone is neutral, the words a simple question with no judgment.

“Because being us _sucks_ ,” Dean replies, twisting away from the house to look at Cas. “And if he’s still got his humanity, still got that ignorance of living longer than anything but the Earth itself, I don’t wanna take that away.”

“There’s a but in there,” Cas says, still neutral.

“But, if I don’t do this, he won’t have a human life to live for much longer.”

“And Jo will kill you.”

“And Jo will kill me,” Dean agrees, then shoves his way out of the car, skin crawling slightly at the fact that he’s back here, but this time he’s getting out of the car and walking up to the door. His hand goes out and leans hard on the doorbell, the clanging bell sounding altogether too much like a funeral toll for his liking. He almost turns away from the door during the wait, a part of him almost hoping that he’d gotten it wrong, that this wasn’t the right house, wasn’t the right time, that Charon or Sammael or Adam, or whoever was left inside that fragile human skin wasn’t there, would never be there, at least not for Dean.

But God had always favored the faithful, and Dean was the furthest from faithful as one could possibly go, which was why he supposed not five or so seconds after the door bell stopped and he began to turn away there was a squeak of slightly rusted hinges carrying open the front door. There, standing in the slightly shadowed hallway, was the older version of the boy he’d seen so many years ago, and all traces of his hope that maybe, just this once, his Father was smiling upon him disappeared when Adam said, solemnly: “Hello, Dean.”

“Dammit,” Dean says, eyes closing on a heaving sort of sigh. “I was really hoping you weren’t going to say that.”

“Dean is fond of futile causes,” Cas says in a low rumble, then smiles almost sheepishly. “May we come in?”

“I dunno,” Adam says, not moving from where he stood. “Can you? Or do you need that invitation? Because if you need it to get in here, I’m not quite sure I want to give it.”

“Oh please,” Dean rolls his eyes and stomps into the house, pushing past Adam on the way inside.

xXxXx

“Did I mention he’s also not fond of being mistaken for the fang gang?” Cas says as he drew level with Adam, the both of them turning to watch Dean’s back disappear down the long hallway, his destination unknown.

“I think I got that on my own,” Adam says, then looked up. “So, what’re my long lost brother and a dude who looks like he does taxes for the proverbial Jones’ doing here?”

“You’ll see,” Cas says, gesturing for Adam to lead him through the house, even though both of them knew they’d just be following in Dean’s wake. “Though I don’t think you’re going to like it.”

“Yeah?” Adam says, a hint of sarcasm flavoring his tone. “My mum used to say the same thing about John.”

The rest of the winding walk through the house is done in silence, Cas and Adam bottoming out in a kitchen that leads out to a porch that’s seen better days, and certainly never expected to have an Angel of the Lord balancing on its railing, holding a pilfered beer bottle in his hands. Cas notices that the bottle is still closed, that Dean’s just turning the cold glass in his hands, eyes somewhere in the middle distance, and that worries him just a tiny bit in a way he doesn’t want to discuss, not even with himself.

Now it’s Adam’s turn to roll his eyes, the flash of kinship between him and Sam and Dean coming through in one shared facial expression before being buried again as he stomps out the door and around the front of the porch to stare at Dean head on.

“What are you doing here,” he says flatly as Cas watches from the sidelines, not knowing what he was supposed to do in this moment.

“What does it look like?” Dean says, voice sharp in contrast to Adam’s studied blandness. “I’m visiting my brother, having a beer with him on his back porch, you know—” and here he twists off the cap of the bottle and downs a few swallows “—family shit.”

“Last I checked, the Winchesters didn’t do family, just running away and lying,” Adam replies, arms going up to cross over his chest as he settles back on his heels.

“Ah,” Dean gestures with the bottle expansively, an almost manic grin on his face, “now that’s assuming we’re Winchesters—“

“I’m a Milligan,” Adam cuts in, but Dean continues, ignoring his comment.

“Assuming we’re Winchesters, which we aren’t. Unless God decided to get with the times and get a last name and a forwarding address, I’m pretty sure we’re still just ‘-el’,” Dean pauses and takes another drink. “Except for Sam, he always was a rebel.”

“I am having none of this shit,” Adam says, voice calm with only the slightest hint of some other emotion, “Bad enough that my situation is what it is, but I am not coming back, not all the way.” Cas starts at that, eyes scanning Adam a little more closely than he had before. Sure enough, a slight tinge of Grace bordered his soul, a small taste of what he was, what he had been leaking through.

“Enough to scare the neighbors,” he says when he catches Cas looking, “and to keep me up at night.”

“You’re not going to be able to keep that up,” Cas says as Dean looks on, his bottle getting emptier and emptier.

“I can try,” Adam says, a smile that was almost a grimace flashing across his face. “And one way to do that is to keep yahoos like you from dragging me back.”

“Do you know who we are?” Cas asks, curious at the wording of Adam’s statement.

“I know you’re a bona fide angel, never fallen, never dreamed of it,” Adam says.

“And him,” he says, waving at Dean, “I don’t wanna know what he is.”

Dean laughs, the sound rolling out between the two of them and mushrooming up in a high cloud of slight hysteria.

“I’m an angel, kid, same as him,” Dean says when his laughter has mostly faded away. “Might not be as squeaky clean, but there you have it.”

“If you’re an angel,” Adam asks, “where are your wings.”

It’s silent for a moment, nothing but the sounds of insects and others going about their daily lives coming through, and then that silence is broken by the sound of glass shattering as Dean’s empty bottle hits the ground. Dean himself follows shortly after it, boots crunching on the broken glass, scraping it across the concrete of the patio as he straightens from the force of the jump. Cas has moved forward by now, a quick burst of speed putting him in the middle of Adam and Dean, but still off to the side. He wants to keep them from doing any permanent damage to each other, but he’s not stupid.

“You wanna see my wings, boat boy?” Dean says, shrugging off his jacket and letting it drop to the ground, a plaid shirt following it to leave him in nothing but a ratty old Bon Jovi t-shirt.

“Don’t call—”

“Dean, I don’t—”

He ignores them both, just smiles and turns on one crunching heel, saying over his shoulder, “Have at them.”

There’s a rushing pull and then a boom of displaced air as Dean pulls his wings from the ether, the light that normally accompanies the arrival of angel wings glaringly absent. For a moment, Cas can’t see them, is confused by why Dean would promise to show both he and Adam his wings and then renege, when portions of the black that make up the back of his t-shirt start to move, short arcs of black arching up over Dean’s shoulder to end in abortive stubs just below his elbows.

Cas makes a low noise as he catches sight of the house behind Dean through a jagged hole in his left wing, the feathers around it fluttering black and burnt, soot shifting off all of them to form small piles of ash and disintegrated feathers around his feet, the sparkle of the glass turning into a sooty gleam that’s almost offensive.

Dean shoves his hands in his jeans pocket, causing the twisted limbs to shake, even more ash falling loose as his head tips back to stare at the sky above them.

“This is why you’re coming back, boat boy,” he says, the brashness of before fading away into a quiet acceptance. “Because a wingless angel can only do so much, because this is what happened the last time my father tried to start a war, because I refuse to let the Earth be scorched for such a dumbshit reason as ‘ _it is written_ ’.”

“And,” Dean says, turning after another boom pulls what’s left of his wings back into the ether, grinning slightly at both Cas and Adam’s deliberately blank faces, “Seph will kill me if I don’t bring you back.”

Adam jerks a bit at that, eyes brightening a little at the mention of Persephone.

“She would, wouldn’t she,” he mutters, then sets his shoulders. “Fine, I’ll come with. But I’m not letting go of this—” he waved at himself “—until I have to.”

“Fair enough,” Dean says, walking out of the circle of ash and glass and grabbing his shirt and jacket, pulling them both back on. When he’s redressed in all of his layers, he waves expansively and says: “After you, boat boy.”

Cas follows behind as Adam stomps past, and lingers a bit, letting him get far enough into the house that the door closes and he and Dean have at least some semblance of privacy.

“You never told me about the wings,” he says, eyes straight ahead, matching Dean’s.

“Never came up.”

“In five days of travel, it you couldn’t find the time to mention it?”

“Would it have made a difference?” Dean’s eyes slant over to look at Cas. “Not like you can do anything about it.”

“I can go kill the person that did it, might make me feel better,” Cas says, returning Dean’s look.

“Mmm, that would be a dumb idea,” Dean says, starting to walk towards the door.

“And why’s that?” Cas asks as he follows slowly, eyes catching slightly on Dean’s hands as he grasps the knob of the door and pulls it open.

“Because,” Dean says, not looking back, “I did it to myself.”

The door slams shut, and Dean walks away as Cas stands there in some sort of shock, not quite believing what he’s heard, not wanting to believe it. The thought of Dean, alone before his fall amputating his own wings with what looked like his own flaming sword was a sight Cas wishes he’d never had to envisage. Partly because the pain Dean had gone through, no, the pain _Michael_ had gone through must have been excruciating, and also because he had gone through it alone. Cas had been in Heaven, had never thought of following Michael’s plummet to Earth, never considered giving up his own place in the Host even as he realized what they all had lost. Those thoughts washed over him in a wave quite unlike the supposed feelings of an angel, a wave that was rather more similar to humans unbound by a God that had lost interest in them, a wave he didn’t have any other name for but heatbreak.

Ten minutes later he finally makes it to the front of the house, where Adam and Dean are leaning up against the Impala, exchanging the occasional word, but mostly staying silent.

“Shall we?” Cas asks, not wanting to stay long enough to let his face slip, to let the emotions mostly believed impossible of angels to slip through.

“After you,” gestures Dean, and sends Adam off to get his car from the garage, a beat up old Challenger rolling out a few minutes later.

When they cross the Minnesota line, the halfway mark on their journey home, Cas finally speaks, breaking the silence that now seemed to follow them like a cloud.

“I wish you would have told me.”

“Told you what? About my wings?” Dean shrugs. “Like I said, it wouldn’t have made a difference.”

“No Dean,” Cas says, eyes on the twist of his own fingers in his lap. “About the fall. I wish you would have told me.”

“Still wouldn’t have made a difference.”

“I could have come, could have stayed with you—” it’s an outburst and Cas knows he’s getting too loud but he can’t help himself.

“No, you couldn’t have,” Dean says, and he’s quiet in contrast to Cas’ half yell.

“Why—”

“Because you’re an angel, Cas,” Dean says, smiling a bit. “Always have been. I knew what it was like to be down below, knew what I was giving up, what I was gaining. You—” he shakes his head a bit, the smile slipping “—You would have just lost.”

Cas is silent then, not wanting to dwell on that, on the fact that he might never be able to fall because at his core, he doesn’t want to. He recaps this whole long week in his head, his mind snagging slightly on the movies he’d been watching while Dean was out cold and Sam was off doing whatever and he was still unsure of his place in all of this. Even though it had been the wrong film at the time, it still didn’t absolve the fact that the films had a point that was applicable here.

“Even though I didn’t fall— _couldn’t_ fall, I still think I could have helped, can help, now that I’ve found you again,” he says, hands stilling from their twisting dance.

“Yeah, and why’s that?” Dean asks. “Not that I was going to let you leave anyway.” He looks over. “You aren’t the only one who lost out when I left.”

Cas clears his throat and says “Well, to quote _Harry Potter_ —”

Dean snorts and the car swerves slightly to the left before correcting.“I cannot believe you just said that, Cas, please tell me there’s better reading material in heaven than—”

“The Lord is not a great fan of Dickens, and I can’t blame him and that is beside the point—”

“The point being that the angels had midnight madness along with the humans?”

“Raphael looks very fetching in Slytherin colors,” Cas says, slightly irritated, “and now you’ve gotten me distracted.”

“The whole point of all this, really,” Dean grins, eyes miraculously still on the road.

“What I meant to say was: ‘What’s coming, will come. And we’ll meet it when it does.’”

“Poetic, man, now let’s get home before Sam eats all the food.”

Cas leans back in his seat, eyes on the horizon ahead. Even as the world got darker as the sunset and the armies of the Lord prepared for war, he could have sworn that it had just lightened, darkness and death nothing against the collective belief that it gets better, that although humankind might be devastated, whether by themselves or by forces outside their ken, they would always keep going.

His laughter rolled out into the flat lands of the Dakotas, underscored by a chorus of “what” from Dean, heart high with hope and the thought of Bobby’s cooking.

**Author's Note:**

> Some last things:
> 
> As you can see, the apocalypse isn’t over, but this small part of it is. There might be more, there might not be, it all depends if I feel like the story wants to continue in words, instead of just in thought alone.  
> Somewhere, in a very dark place on my hard drive, there is a list of just who is who, and when they were who they were, and what they were before that, and what they’ll become after that. Maybe one day I’ll show it to y’all. Probably once I finish with this ‘verse (if I finish this ‘verse), and all the fun surprises about people’s identities have been dragged out as long as possible.
> 
> I doubt any of you noticed, but this story is a very, very loose AU based off of Rob Thurman’s Trick of the Light. If you haven’t read it, I suggest you do at some point, especially if you like urban fantasy. 
> 
> Sam’s arm is broken about halfway through, and is never mentioned as being broken again. It’s not a mistake; it’s me trying to make a point about the fact that Sam, although he’s still playing human, is still as much of a god as he ever was throughout all of this.
> 
> If you’ll notice, both Heaven and Hell (Hades, really) have things that don’t directly correlate with the time period they’re supposedly in (clowns in Hades and classic rock in Heaven), and that’s because I had this weird concept that both Hades and Heaven exist at all times, and yet in none. So although the rulers and seasons of both change, when it’s Autumn, it’s all Autumns and yet none. Deep and confusing, I know, but that’s the afterlife for you.


End file.
